It's like this because it is an overwhelming benefit to someone who is selling something. Not because it is necessarily overwhelmingly what people want.
Some other market outcomes I'm unhappy with: ad tracking, excessive plastic packaging, cheap goods - expensive repairs, all sodas are at least twice as sweet as they need to be.
When there are options, I choose otherwise. If an option I've come to rely on changes to be something I don't prefer - i'll raise a stink.
When the market speaks, people who insist opt-out and telemetry auto-update is necessary then insist that the market just doesn't know what's good for it. This is Audacity forking. It could fail, but I don't know that anyone has the kind of allegiance to Audacity as a project (that is recently under new ownership) to not follow the fork. The new ownership didn't buy the users, and if somebody else will take better care of the project why not go with them?
The project lead said he had no say about the telemetry and couldn't turn it down. For me, that makes is a business decision and not a technical one. This is to monetize, not to help me.
It will fail because the number of users outraged about this is far lower than the threshold needed to create a sustainable community. Check back in a few months and see.
It’s crash reporting and update checking. Stop getting so outraged over such minor things.
This is funny because usually whenever i see that mentioned to excuse negative behavior it isn't really about the market speaking but about the market staying silent :-P
The market has been given plenty of choices. What we’ve seen repeatedly is that the number of people who will actually do anything _more_ than speak loudly is extremely small.
More people think open source means “I can be VP of product without showing up to work” than “I can roll up my sleeves and help make the hard thing I want happen”.
I don’t see anyone forking that in outrage.