When Muse Group acquired Audacity and added telemetry with Google and Yandex, the community forked it as Tenacity. Then 4chan got involved, the lead maintainer was doxxed and fled, and chaos ensued.
Audacity/Tenacity is a multi-track audio editor and recorder written in C++ using the wxWidgets toolkit. It supports recording, editing, mixing, and applying effects to audio, with support for VST and LADSPA plugins. Tenacity aims to port the application to modern frameworks while maintaining privacy.
Audacity had been the quiet workhorse of open-source audio editing for two decades — the kind of software your uncle uses to record his podcast and that radio stations rely on for production. Then in May 2021, Muse Group (known for MuseScore) acquired the project, and everything went sideways.
Muse Group's first move was to add telemetry that uploaded unspecified metrics to Google Analytics and Yandex servers. Their privacy policy included language about collecting IP addresses and sharing data with third parties. For an audio editor used by journalists, activists, and privacy-conscious users worldwide, this was a non-starter. The community erupted, and Audacity was forked over 50 times in a matter of days.
The most prominent fork was Tenacity, created by a pseudonymous developer called 'cookiengineer.' The project aimed to roll back the telemetry changes and maintain Audacity as privacy-respecting free software. But then things got truly bizarre: a naming poll was hijacked by 4chan users who voted en masse for 'Sneedacity' (a reference to a Simpsons meme). When cookiengineer deleted the poll and chose 'Tenacity' instead, the 4chan contingent went nuclear.
What followed was a harassment campaign that escalated from online abuse to real-world doxxing. Cookiengineer reported that people showed up at their home, knocking on doors and windows to intimidate their family. They resigned as maintainer, stating 'the safety of my family is worth more than an open source project.' The 4chan crowd created their own fork called Sneedacity.
Tenacity eventually recovered after merging with both the Saucedacity and Audacium forks, but the damage was done. Development continues at a much slower pace than Audacity, with a small team working to rebase off newer Audacity releases. Meanwhile, Audacity itself quietly removed the most controversial telemetry features, making the fork's raison d'etre somewhat moot.
Muse Group acquires Audacity and announces telemetry additions
Privacy policy sparks outrage; Audacity forked over 50 times
Tenacity naming poll hijacked by 4chan; 'Sneedacity' wins vote
cookiengineer doxxed and harassed at home; resigns as Tenacity maintainer
Saucedacity merges into Tenacity; development restarts
Audacium also merges into Tenacity
“The safety of my family is worth more than an open source project.”
Tenacity's story is less about software and more about the dark side of open-source community dynamics. The fork demonstrated that even legitimate privacy concerns can be derailed by bad-faith actors, and that maintainers are terrifyingly vulnerable to harassment campaigns.
The broader impact was on Audacity itself: Muse Group significantly softened its telemetry approach and improved its privacy policy in response to the backlash, proving that the threat of a fork can be more effective than the fork itself.