Audacity: Information About Our New Contributor License Agreement | Hacker News Reader

Audacity: Information About Our New Contributor License Agreement

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40 pointsgreyface-12 comments

I find it particularly interesting that they post this as if it's a discussion to be had with the community yet they've already gotten permission[1] from developers by asking them beforehand, in private.

[1]: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932#discuss... (comments from developers themselves also exist further down in the thread)

Remember the news about Audacity getting 'acquired' by Muse group [1]? Many commenters raised question about what acquisition means for a fully free project [2]. Speculating, since we don't have the full information yet, but I think we have the answer. This may be a glimpse of the future, where long running successful community FOSS projects get 'acquired' with commercial ambitions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004688 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27021609

> Naturally, Audacity will remain free and open source with no artificial limitations or paid tiers.

"We'd like to thank all the developers and users of Audacity for supporting our incredible journey, and we hope you will enjoy our new paid product, MuseAudio Pro!"

I actually support this as an Audacity user. While there is the possibility of abuse — see RedHat cutting CentOS short (last night, I converted my final CentOS virtual machine in to a Ubuntu 20.04 VM) and see https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/1643 (or https://freenode.net/news/for-foss for the other side of this soap opera) — there are benefits to this.

One is moving to GPLv3 so that Audacity has VST3 support. Right now, Audacity only has 32-bit VST2 support, which means I currently have to use older versions of my favorite plugins (since the plugins are now 64-bit only) since Audacity is part of my workflow.

The other is making proprietary versions of Audacity for things like the iOS app store, to help fund the development of F/OSS versions of Audacity. In a perfect world, everyone would be able to spend all day making open source for fun and for free, but that’s not the world we live in today.

If Audacity does start to abuse this, we can always fork from the final GPL version of the code base.

I am not an expert, but I read that a CLA is not needed for the gplv2 to 3 transition. it seems to me that the CLA gives a blank check to the "company" to do whatever it wants with the contributed code:

> The CLA provides the ability to release Audacity under multiple licenses

surely this is not okay?

Sorry for the late reply: It depends on the copyright the software has. Some copyright has “GPLv2 or later”/“GPLv3 or later”; other copyright (such as the Linux kernel) is “GPLv2 only”.

CLAs like this are not that uncommon; the Free Software Foundation (FSF) famously requires all patches over 10 lines long (or so) to have a formal copyright assignment given to them.

Muse group appears to be owned by Russian investors, using shell companies in Cyprus.

We are trusting souls and completely trust all Russian investors hiding behind opaque shell companies in Cyprus.

If we were paranoid, we might think that this introduces interesting potential for state level surveillance, analysis of telemetry, injection of malware on potentially millions of Linux installations. Surely that has to be worth some money.

But of course, we are not paranoid are we ?

Tantacrul is killing the project with incredible speed.

in the beginning I was thinking how exciting all this was going to be: audacity revamped by people who care about it. now all we're left with is utter disgust and disappointment.

Just yikes. I don't even know where to start, but I bet someone is gonna fork the project over this.

what a shame. I am not surprised by this, especially after the shenanigans they pulled on musescore. this will cause a lot of bitterness.

GPLv3 again - how the hell did that monstrosity get pushed . The propietary folks have realized it's poisen, switch to it, and then sell a non v3 version.

Smart but damn annoying.

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