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More Audacity news
Posted: May 27th, 2021, 1:54 pm
by KevinS
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/27/audacity_cla/
I have no idea what this means. Can anyone translate this for an amateur? For instance, what is a CLA?
Re: More Audacity news
Posted: May 27th, 2021, 6:48 pm
by Kazbek
I'm not a licensing expert, but in a nutshell, the current license (GPL, copyleft) allows anyone to use Audacity in any way, and prevents software derivatives of Audacity from using a more restrictive license. The CLA grants the owners of Audacity an exclusive exemption to that license, and enables them to do whatever they want with it. In the linked Q&A they swear that they will do the most benign things imaginable. If you aren't a software developer contributing to Audacity, this shouldn't impact you in any way... unless they lied.
Michael
Re: More Audacity news
Posted: May 27th, 2021, 8:44 pm
by annise
to quote
Now we're getting somewhere. What you're actually going to do is release proprietary mobile versions of Audacity, which is exactly what you did with MuseScore. And that is what you need a CLA for. Because the only reason you're going to keep core Audacity open is because you know that would just result in an insta-fork, but you're going to take every chance to create proprietary derivatives that you can monetize and control.
What you're trying to do here is so transparent it's not even funny. I hope the community forks Audacity and the fork becomes the canonical, superior versions, much like happened with LibreOffice. And I hope the same thing happens to MuseScore, because people who continue to fraudulently (and illegally) charge royalties on copyrighted works without authorization of the copyright owners and distribute them to unrelated third parties are not to be trusted in a position of custodianship of a popular open source application.
So at the moment audacity can be used by anyone but can only be released with the same licence but under the new plan the work of the volunteers can be sold.
Anne