The main issue is monetization is hard, and it is even harder for open source projects. This has happened many times with many projects (I remember a period where Chrome extensions were popular in this respect). Anyone suing will need a good lawyer and a specialist in contract law. Arguably, there is a claim on the money the company was sold for and potential future earnings of Audacity post takeover. This hinges on any change of primary aim and purpose and goodwill built up by Audacity. There is a theoretical case in law to sue Audacity. I’m not against takeovers or mergers per se but historically there have been far too many over the past few decades and a lot of them have been by predatory investors who often compromise or destroy the product and organisation and customer base. In one case a developer didn’t open source the app but put the last version they were the sole owner of up on their own server as a free download. Some developers after the deal and before the takeover becomes live have rushed out an update. It’s at that point I either freeze updates for that app or delete it. I’ve seen a few popular apps on Google Play store hit their peak and then be bought out by shady companies who then turn the application into adware/spyware. It had stopped development for several years, and most distro packages were buggy or incomplete, but recently it has resumed development and it’s becoming a real alternative to the closed source project. Ninite came to the rescue again with a clean installer for it, and there was an open source “clone” called Pinta that used some code from the last open source release of, along with a ton of original code. Users (including me) would complain on the forums about the malware and viruses included in the installer, and the maintainer would belittle us and complain about “freeloaders” expecting a great application without wanting to pay for it, as his justification for the malware. Later the updater would pull in malware for a while. Around that time malware started showing up in the installer and for a long time there was no way to get a clean version unless you had archives of the older versions, then used the built in updater. started out as an open source project but its creator/maintainer made it closed source at version 3.5, and had closed the installer before that. This situation is how I found out about back then, as I relied heavily on FileZilla at work for maintaining our websites and at the time I was stuck on Windows there (I am now the sysadmin so I have my own Linux box there for most of my work). This didn’t directly impact the versions packaged for other OSes, nor the source tarballs, but it completely hosed the reputation of the project as a whole, especially considering at the time it was the absolute best FTP software you could get on Windows. Back in 2013 Sourceforge started bundling spyware/malware with the installer for the Windows version of FileZilla. Various forks have already been made, and a few months from now, one or possibly a few of those will come out on top as the proper continuation of the project. The new owner of Audacity might want to turn it into spyware, but unlike with proprietary software, we don’t just have to sit back and take it. This is a sad situation all around – but at the same time, it highlights the incredibly strength, resilience, and unique qualities of open source. While Audacity is nothing more than a desktop program, its developers want to make it phone home with various data taken from users’ machines. The parent company is a multi-national company and it has been trying to start a data-collection mechanism in the software. The same company owns other projects in its portfolio such as Ultimate Guitar (Famous website for Guitar enthuisasts) and MuseScore (Open source music notation software).Įver since, Audacity has been a heated topic. The famous open source audio manipulation program was acquired by a company named Muse Group two months ago.
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