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Comment by ectopod | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what this means? The code is GPL v2. It has 126 contributors on github. The project doesn't seem to use copyright assignment. What has been acquired?

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MuseScore is also GPL, so I assume there is no intent to attempt to change the license. This probably is more about the organization, funding, direction, etc.

Yes, but concretely, what did they buy? And from whom?

They likely now own the copyrights held by the primary developers and all the trademark rights to the Audacity name and logo.

How does trademark work when the license is essentially "do whatever you want to do"?

The license covers the code, not the trademark. You can use the code/software as long as you observe the license, you can use the trademark as long as you follow the rules set out by the trademark owner. E.g. you can totally use the code to make your own audio editor and distribute it, but the trademark terms might not allow you to call it "Audacity".

Iceweasel is a good example, Debian used repackage Firefox wihtout the trademarked stuff.

I'm curious: does the WTFPL also let you appropriate a trademark? Or does it not encompass trademark rights?

I doubt any license that doesn't explicitly address trademarks would be found to cover them, but I'm not a license lawyer.

Copyright law and trademark law are different topics and have different ruling. Most software licenses (except 4 clause BSD or PHP License and few others) don't make any claims about names.

One might try to argue that a name used in software code and distributed under some open source license also gives rights to the name by being source ... but to my knowledge there are no court decisions.

https://www.audacityteam.org/copyright/

> The name “Audacity” is a registered trademark.

It's a regular trademark - it's been acquired.

The trademark isn't covered by the GPL.

GPL isn't "do whatever you want". It's "do whatever you want, as long as you let future users do whatever they want". That's what makes it such a good licence for the community.

Trademarks are actually still useful for open-source software, since they ensure that a malicious or incompetent party can't ruin the name of your software by shipping a modification that does bad things.

Jason Rohrer ran into this very issue when other developers made their own client for his game, using a variation on the game's name. They didn't respond to him asking that they don't use the name, and eventually he was convinced that trademarking the name is the right tool to project it. The original game client is still open-source (and maybe the server too, dunno).

(Not to imply that copyright isn't useful: OSS licensing, and especially restrictive copyleft licenses, literally piggyback on copyright law.)

This is how the Bukkit disaster happened. Microsoft "bought" the leading Minecraft server software, hiring some of the major developers and I guess not telling anyone else, and some of them were unamused that they were (in their eyes) doing free work for Microsoft when their colleagues got hired. So they rescinded their GPL licensing of their contributions and sent DMCA notices. Which pretty much ended the project, except for Spigot continuing development in the form of patches that the server operator applies with a script.

It should be noted that the authors didn't rescind any licenses, per se. Rather, distributing binary versions of Bukkit was always in violation of the GPL (since the bundled Mincraft code did not have source available). The former author simply started enforcing this. Important distinction since rescinding the license would be a far more legally/ethically dubious action.

*Mojang, not Microsoft. EvilSeph was hired in 2011, Microsoft bought Mojang in 2014.

Well, imagining it from the buyer's perspective, if I bought Audacity then now I can make changes to it and while there may be other forks, these changes will be likely be recognized as "the" Audacity.

So if for example I wanted to cross-promote my other products or add a "pro" paid version of some sort, I could do that, and those would end up in the main version most people are downloading.

Not saying they are doing this, but the copyright owner can fork the GPL work and create a closed source version if they want to. The GPL doesn't restrict the copyright owner in any way.

But as GP mentioned, the project has 126 contributors on GitHub who each own part of the copyright. So Muse Group doesn't own the full copyright of Audacity now.

Yes, I suppose they would have to back up time and take an earlier branch where the number of significant contributors was much smaller and easier to cull down.

If they wanted to do that there's no need to get an ok from 100 or so devs, because you only need a working version, not to be able to use avery single release with the new license. VLC was able to do it (albeit the change was from gpl to lgpl), there's probably 10 or so devs that owns 80% or so percent of the copyrighted code from the current version, once you get those to agree with the change, in the worst case you have to rewrite 20% of your software.

>But as GP mentioned, the project has 126 contributors on GitHub who each own part of the copyright

Not sure about this case, but iirc you can have contributors to a project without them owing "part of the copyright" for the stuff they wrote. You just have to make them assign the copyright to you if they want to include their code in the project (they can always fork if they don't like that, but the original authors still get the copyright to the core project).

Also, and orthogonal, a lot of time there are 1-2-5-10 core devs, and the rest 100s are just some small changes here and there, fixes to the documentation, some plugin contribution, etc. In other words, easily writen out, if it comes to that.

Trademark maybe?

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