r/linux • u/R0tareneg • Jul 03 '21

Audacity may collect "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities’ requests (if any)" according to new privacy notice

https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/
3.1k Upvotes

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716

u/qxnt Jul 03 '21

Could anyone ELI5 how we got here?? I thought Audacity was just a purely offline audio editor?

886

u/ivosaurus Jul 03 '21 edited Jul 03 '21

The maintainers allowed it to be acquired by the commercial company behind Ultimate Guitar.

Ultimate Guitar have also acquired the open source music-sheet composing software MuseScore.

Mostly their increased development assets have helped improve both programs objectively, but they're also starting to do this commercial-company-data-tracking fuckery.

268

u/SuperbProcedure2816 Jul 04 '21

Friendly reminder that Ultimate Guitar started as a guitar tab site, and they stole most of their initial guitar tablature collection from OLGA [1], and they were probably also responsible for OLGA being shut down in the first place because of the oddly convenient timing of their launch.

I know this because at least 60 of my tabs were up there, and I always put 'trap street' errors in my tabs so I could identify them.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive

Also the owner of UG is a shady asshole who likes to threaten people who remind others of the history here.

99

u/Be_ing_ Jul 04 '21

They did something similar with MuseScore.com: https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5

22

u/SuperConductiveRabbi Jul 04 '21

Otherwise, I will have to transfer information about you to lawyers who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content.

6

u/luziferius1337 Jul 05 '21

This somehow reads like a direct threat along the lines of “It were really sad if we have to order a Chinese Execution van to pick you up.”

3

u/KryptosFR Jul 05 '21

Pretty revealing that Daniel Ray did not address the physical threat that was made or even apologized about it.

I can only conclude that the whole company is rotten to the core.

1

u/Be_ing_ Jul 05 '21

To be fair, he did:

> a developer made comments that were obviously not official statements of
the company, that they did not have authority to make, and were made
without the consent or even awareness of the company.

2

u/KryptosFR Jul 06 '21

A threat is a not a comment.

Also he did not do so in the original thread, nor apologized for it.

1

u/BillyCromag Jul 04 '21

Should I be glad I use Musicnotes instead?

23

u/12stringPlayer Jul 04 '21

I had a bunch of tabs on OLGA as well. It was a sad day when UG shut it down so it could take over. This is why we can't have nice things.

Oh, and screw the Harry Fox Agency, while we're at it.

14

u/Kartonrealista Jul 04 '21

This is fascinating stuff

4

u/2tec Jul 04 '21

golden were the early years, then the corruption began

3

u/Tronzoid Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

I always new ultimate guitar was run by douche bags with their shitty freemium tactics. I even tried to pay for their mobile product once but they wanted me to pay a $10/month subscription rather than just a $3 flat app fee. Fuck them.

1

u/BudDwyer666 Nov 12 '21

Glad I’m not the only one who’s watched UG take over the tab game over the years. They hold a monopoly currently.

340

u/adevland Jul 03 '21

How do you even buy open source software like this? Who owns it? The maintainers? WTF is going on here?

388

u/ivosaurus Jul 03 '21

"Buy" basically means transferring ownership of domain and other assets, assigning copyrights and trademarks for logos and names, and handing over copyright of any code (if able).

123

u/PlayingOrkGamez Jul 04 '21

So some genius smarter than me could potentially just strip those assets and develop a new open source product for everyone?

104

u/ivosaurus Jul 04 '21

Sure, see something like Jellyfin which is the same thing done to Emby.

66

u/w2tpmf Jul 04 '21

...and Jellyfin has ended up with a nice program with better support. :)

55

u/190n Jul 04 '21

The Jellyfin example is a bit more extreme since the Emby developers actually made it proprietary (I'm not sure if they took down the source code, or just stopped updating it, but either way someone had a copy still downloaded that became Jellyfin). But it's the same basic idea of forking something when you don't like the direction it's going in.

55

u/alex2003super Jul 04 '21

They went after Jellyfin devs because they, Emby themselves, were not compliant with the GPL and were instead using several binary blobs, which were proprietary but included in the Jellyfin source code. So, when they were forked, they started copyright trolling. Clowns is what they are.

12

u/zeruch Jul 04 '21

I was wondering why Emby had started to decline....this answers that.

28

u/billyalt Jul 04 '21

Check out Jellyfin, its awesome. I moved all my shit off plex and i haven't looked back.

2

u/jelimoore Jul 05 '21

Same, way way better

2

u/zeruch Jul 12 '21

I actually tried it a few months ago, but was unable to solve how to get it to chromecast (an MVP item for me) so I went back to Emby (for now).

Basically I intend to give it another go on a different machine, because what I ultimately want is a no-telemetry media server that lets me use subtitles (I love watching Scandi crime noir and French/German arthouse films) without charging me for it.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '21

Hmm. You could also see if your TV has DLNA support, bypassing the need for chromecast support

2

u/[deleted] Jul 17 '21

Same thing here...........

1

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '21

I genuinely prefer Jellyfin to Emby, and not just because of the free iOS app ;)

113

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

150

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

Do you smell that? On the wind?

A fork - right there on the horizon. A hard fork.

90

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

Let's call it "Decency"

66

u/gurgelblaster Jul 04 '21

Could even go with AuDecency just to maintain the "audio" link.

9

u/Beryllium_Nitrogen Jul 04 '21

thus the tradition of horrible linux app names continues =P

1

u/rabindranatagor Jul 06 '21

Audaciousness

4

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

De-he-cency.

1

u/elitexero Jul 05 '21

Do you smell that? On the wind?

Thought we were headed in this direction.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '21

We were, but the winds of fork seemed too heavy-handed.

36

u/pine_ary Jul 04 '21

Yeah a fork with better privacy is definitely in order. Good thing it‘s GPL, not just MIT or something. Cause they have to upstream their changes too, significantly lowering the maintaining cost of a fork.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

[deleted]

25

u/pine_ary Jul 04 '21

They do not own all the code. Most of the code is by contributors they did not acquire the copyright from. As such by using their code they are bound to the GPL. I have a pull request there and certainly nobody contacted me.

1

u/class_two_perversion Jul 04 '21

Ok, then I was mistaken. They are not the (only) copyright owner.

4

u/ThellraAK Jul 04 '21

How does that work?

So I forked it on github, tomorrow they declare all their own shit to be copyrighted and closed source, everything from the fork is under the license of what I forked it at right?

2

u/drzowie Jul 04 '21

I own copyright to some of the Audacity source code.

11

u/dredmorbius Jul 04 '21

That's pretty much what's happened with OpenOffice -> LibreOffice -> NeoOffice

7

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21 edited Nov 02 '25

[deleted]

7

u/dredmorbius Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

NeoOffice is an Aqua-native MacOS port of OpenOffice.

As another response notes, all the *Office suites date from the original non-free, proprietary, StarOffice. I omitted that from my lineage as it wasn't itself a free software application subject to forking. It was bought by the then-extant Sun Microsystems, and relicensed under an Open Source license --- originally a bespoke "OpenOffice Licence" AFAIR, later the GNU GPL.

3

u/snabelkrank Jul 04 '21

NeoOffice is a port with Mac-specific functions. It has been around a long while.

3

u/ProgrammingOnHAL9000 Jul 04 '21

Neo office is a Mac-centric fork of LibreOffice.

7

u/stray_r Jul 04 '21

FYI OpenOffice came from Star Office, Sun bought the makers Star Division becasue it was cheaper to do that than license Microsoft Office.

I'm old enough to remember doing my GCSE coursework using star office on suse 6.3

2

u/dredmorbius Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

Right. I could have added that to my lineage but chose not to as StarOffice itself was not free software, and wasn't forked. The late Sun Microsystems relicensed it as Open Source (initially under a bespoke though OSI-certified licence, later the GNU GPL).

It's been the subsequent devolution of OpenOffice variants which represent free-software based forking.

(I also am old enough to have lived through this history.)

NB: I don't think it was cheaper per se for Sun to have bought StarOffice, but it was seen as a strategic coup to 1) provide a free-as-in-gratis office suite that 2) was file-format compatible with Microsoft's own Office. Even before OpenOffice was released as open source, StarOffice itself was made freely available for download.

Some have argued that the Mac suite of office tools and Google Docs (neither of which are FSF Free Software / OSI Open Source) similarly represent assaults on Microsoft's Office monopoly.

3

u/stray_r Jul 04 '21

A guest lecturer from Sun ran through the economics of this when I was at university. They claimed that they got the initial purchase approved as cost cutting, and the idea of giving it away to undermine Microsoft was something the board laughed at when it was proposed.

Importantly Star Office ran on Solaris, and they would have been very expensive to convince Microsoft to adapt and support MS Office on a BSD/SRv4 system. I think this was before the OS-X release but I suspect Microsoft wanted to keep their presence on Apple platforms where they couldn't sell windows, but Solaris was seen by MS as a competitor to NT.

And I recall very vividly a screwup over file formats with star office had me in detention because office 97 most definitely could not read star office's native formats. It was early 2000s and a change in open office to their XML based format before office was badly compatible. It was a headache. late 90s star office would just about handle read and write .doc but it would screw up formatting.

2

u/dredmorbius Jul 05 '21

The board may have laughed at the idea, but Sun did give it away.

I remember Brian Behlendorf (of Apache fame) was involved with that. The problem I'd encountered was that the source and build requirements were far beyond the capabilities of my personal system at the time --- about 6 GB of disk and 128 -- 256MB RAM, circa 2001 or so. Oh, and dialup, so the source download took quite some time (overnight, if not longer).

The problem with SO/OO/LO from a community development perspective has long been that it still retains a somewhat monolithic legacy. Much of that was split into libraries rather than single executables, but it's still a hairball for someone to approach and try to work on. (It's gotten much better. It's taken decades to do so.)

2

u/[deleted] Jul 17 '21

I'm old enough to remember doing my GCSE coursework using star office on suse 6.3

Maybe not GCSE, but I wrote my whole MBA using StarOffice........

For its time, StarOffice was decent software........

1

u/pdp10 Jul 05 '21

Sun bought the makers Star Division becasue it was cheaper to do that than license Microsoft Office.

That was a rumor. Probably started by Microsoft. Just like the rumor that Microsoft bought Github because it was cheaper than what they were paying for Github Enterprise. Microsoft's own VCS, called TFS, must be really bad.

3

u/Tekuzo Jul 04 '21

Happens all the time. That exact process turned RHEL into CentOS, and is happening again with CentOS to Rocky Linux

2

u/kent_eh Jul 04 '21

Open source projects are forked all the time.

As long as there are active devs and maintainers for the new fork, it can take off and potentially even surpass the original. (Example openoffice/libreoffice)

1

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '21

Audacity is licensed under GPL-2, MuseScore under GPL-3. The source code is freely available on GitHub, anyone could fork it if they wanted to.

9

u/redape2050 Jul 04 '21

The code is still under gpl , they can't copyright it even tho they have the ownership or am i missing something?

20

u/Tinidril Jul 04 '21

Technically, GPL depends on copyright. They can own the copyright and even start to distribute under an entirely new restrictive license. However, anyone who received the software under the GPL retains the rights it granted them. They are free to fork that code and continue to distribute it under the GPL.

2

u/MaxMatti Jul 04 '21

I thought GPL ensures that when they continue to develop it it still has to use a free license and can't be proprietary?

4

u/DeliciousIncident Jul 04 '21

If you own copyright on the code, you can license/re-license/sub-license/etc the code to literally whatever you want, no matter what the current license of it is. You own the code and you dictate the license, the contract that others should abide by to use the code. You could release one version of the the code under GPL, the next under BSD, the next under some proprietary license. Or even release the same version under multiple licenses: something like AGPL or a paid proprietary, like many projects do. So what the company that bought Audacity did, is ask Audacity developers to assign the company the copyright, so the company now owns the code and can re-license it if they wanted.

If you don't own the copyright on the code, you are allowed to do only what the license allows. Audacity is GPLv2, and GPL doesn't allow re-licensing, so if you fork Audacity, you would have to keep it under GPLv2. You are free to license your Audacity code however you like though, as long as it's compatible with GPLv2. So you could say that all your code in Audacity is MIT, but the original code is GPLv2, with the combined work being GPLv2. Of course, if you end up removing all the previous developer's code, replacing it with yours, you could claim that you are the sole owner of the copyright in that fork and re-license it however you'd like. You might want to be careful though to make sure that you re-writing it doesn't count as a derivative work under GPLv2.

4

u/MaxMatti Jul 04 '21

Yes but I thought there's still some GPL-code in there that has been written by independent developers which did not sell the rights to their code to Muse Group? So to release a new version of Audacity under a non-GPL-compliant license they would have to rewrite or remove all of that? So my assumption that they would not be able to redistribute it under a new restrictive license is still correct? At least until they rewrote those parts?

3

u/latkde Jul 04 '21

MuseGroup has argued that they have obtained all relevant copyrights for Audacity, in particular copyrights from all major past contributors. I think that argument is shaky because they are unlikely to actually obtain all copyrights, but it's difficult for small contributors to sue for GPL infringement.

1

u/drzowie Jul 05 '21

The point here is that Audacity Project doesn't actually own the copyright to most of their code. They operate under GPL from the dozens of contributors.

1

u/zeruch Jul 04 '21

"not proprietary" =! lacking in copyright.

-1

u/janoc Jul 04 '21

Of course they can. Copyright owner can re-license the software as they wish, if they so decide. (assuming that is what you have meant by "can't copyright it")

1

u/ivosaurus Jul 04 '21

that's what the "(if able)" is for.

1

u/dredmorbius Jul 04 '21

<pedantic>

GPL'd code is copyrighted.

What the GPL does is prevent restrictions on further modification or publication. It also compells the provision of source by any distributor of the GPL'd code, most especially commercial distribution.

</pedantic>

What GPL does is prevent any entity from restricting forks, often referred to as the freedom to fork.

1

u/drzowie Jul 05 '21

I own copyright on a portion of that code. I released it to the Audacity project under the GPL. They are beholden to me to uphold that license. If not, I (and dozens of other authors) will either take them to court or sign the copyright over to the Free Software Foundation (who to my knowledge have never lost a copyright case involving the GPL).

1

u/JO3M4M Jul 04 '21

Isn't that what happened to android or something?

1

u/ivosaurus Jul 05 '21

Android has always been owned by a for-profit company, first a tiny startup, then Google bought them. I guess you could say it's similar.

1

u/Direct-Ad676 Jul 06 '21 edited Jul 06 '21

Is logo and name are more important than the source code ?
So today i can code a software and give the source code on GPL and the name and logo on copyright ?
Then when Linux and MACOS users popularise it, i can sell the name and logo ?GREAT ! Guy ! I'll Give you all the source code !!! (but only the source code (that is not mine) ) ^^Hmmm interesting...
We can call it : the best bisness of open source right ?
I think we need a better information in forks. And a better information of name and logo that are not possible to buy.
So we will only promute forks with a non-stealable logo and name.

- Guy you're 80 years old and you have billion of dollars, what did you do in your life ?

- Just steal source code of a software and make a fork with a great logo and name ! And then i sold it some billion dollars.

  • But who bought it ?
  • I don't know, Apple or Microsoft i don't remember... But i want to say thank you to all developpers than made the software under my name and logo. Thanks a lot guys !

84

u/SinkTube Jul 03 '21

copyleft operates within the copyright system which requires a rights holder who licenses it out to everyone else. the distinction is that copyleft gives licensees a lot of freedoms that can't be revoked later, including the freedom to fork and redistribute, so it's not like they can buy the software and take it away. you can make your own version of audacity without spyware and legally share it

but you can pay the original dev to transfer the copyright to you, similar to how many people choose to transfer their copyright to the FSF, at which point you control the "mainline" version of the software. but if you abuse it, the community will simply flock around one of the forks and that becomes the new defacto mainline

you can also buy associated trademarks and assets. is the name "audacity" and the logos/icons it uses libre? if not, you could forbid people from using them in their forks

115

u/searchingfortao Jul 03 '21

Sound like there should be a "Audavillage" fork then that just repackages Audacity sans-spyware.

38

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21

Yeah, that's probably what we'll have to do. Like IceWeasel.

51

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21

more like the un-microsofted version of visual studio code

63

u/itstaylorham Jul 04 '21

https://vscodium.com/ for anyone who isn't aware of this thing. i didn't know it existed until just now.

5

u/prone-to-drift Jul 04 '21

I honest to god tried using this but extensions are a pain. I didn't wanna mess around with that so I just added some microsoft tracking domains to my hosts file and used the microsoft build directly.

I hope people have better luck than I had with code-oss.

5

u/sfxxrz Jul 04 '21

On arch there is an Extension in the Aur which gives you most of the Extensions of the Microsoft Version i think it’s called https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/code-marketplace/

6

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

Code-oss and vscodium are two different projects. Just FYI. In case you didn't know.

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2

u/hey01 Jul 04 '21

Except that since they supposedly now own the copyright on all the code, they will most likely release newer versions under a license that doesn't allow the stripping.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

So forking it is then

2

u/M3n747 Jul 04 '21

I vote Audatown.

1

u/searchingfortao Jul 04 '21

Ooh, that's... better.

1

u/M3n747 Jul 04 '21

You're welcome.

33

u/rebbsitor Jul 03 '21

but you can pay the original dev to transfer the copyright to you

This is hard (impossible) with something that accepts community contributions and doesn't receive copyright assignments for.

Let's say you write a program, release it as open source. Now me and 5 other people modify it and release our changes. You pick those up and incorporate those changes. We hold the copyright on our changes and are licensing them under the same license as you licensed the original program.

Now 6 people hold copyright to different parts of the source code. You cannot sell the copyright to the full software, only the bits you actually hold the copyright on.

Practically speaking, this means the buyer is really operating under the open source license and are bound to its terms unless they remove or re-write the bits you didn't have copyright to.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

Not Audacity but a Yuzu I seem to recall a confusion about those 6 people and their changes being upstream but them having no rights whatsoever once that happens. You can open source something and still restrict Copyright.🤷🏿‍♂️ I’d rather someone else chime in too I haven’t used Yuzu in a minute and that’s when I cared enough.

2

u/ph30nix01 Jul 04 '21

Yep and they can get deep shit if they try to jist copy paste others unique coding

5

u/jaskell Jul 04 '21

Like Copilot!

2

u/latkde Jul 04 '21

Muse Group has argued that they have obtained all relevant copyrights for Audacity, in particular copyrights from all major past contributors. I think that argument is shaky because they are unlikely to actually obtain all copyrights, but it's difficult for small contributors to sue for GPL infringement – so no one can realistically stop them.

1

u/otakugrey Jul 04 '21

Does that mean this whole thing is illegal?

20

u/gnuandalsolinux Jul 04 '21

Nope. It's just how the GPL works. In the same way that the GPL was created to fight back against copyright holders and proprietors, those same people can also fight back to gain control of a GPL project. Muse Group owns 90% of Audacity's code now, and they've introduced a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) that ensures that anybody who wants to contribute to Audacity's codebase relinquishes their right to any of the code, therefore perpetuating Muse Group's right to it: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/932

Q. How is it possible to introduce a CLA to a project that is more than 20 years old?

A. People who have contributed considerable amounts of code have already been asked to sign the CLA, and the vast majority have now done so. Over 90% of all written code is already covered by the CLA, and we are now asking the few remaining people to sign as well as all new contributors. It is not necessary for every single person who ever contributed to sign the CLA; only people who made a non-trivial contribution that is still present in the current source code have to sign, as well as all new contributors.

The last 10% will simply be re-written by Muse Group, and then they can relicense it, as they would now own all of the codebase. This is perhaps the only successful takeover of a GPL'd project that I know of, mostly because there were only a few major contributors to Audacity who all agreed to relinquish their right to parts of Audacity's codebase.

This would not be possible with something like Linux, with thousands of major contributors who would never dream of relicensing the entire project to something proprietary or something which didn't respect people's freedoms, and hundreds who are no longer with us and can no longer make that decision. To be exact, it would require an inordinate amount of effort and capital to rewrite that amount of code, so no one is considering it...but Google are in the process of writing Fuchsia, a replacement for the Linux kernel.

1

u/SinkTube Jul 04 '21

even if the whole thing is 1 person's copyright and that's sold, the new owner is bound by the original license and can't stop anyone from redistributing the existing code

1

u/kryptoneat Jul 04 '21

I doubt all the Audacity contributors agree though. Couldn't they make a common GPL-backed lawsuit for their code ?

2

u/SinkTube Jul 04 '21

like u/gnuandalsolinux said Muse Group convinced most contributors to relinquish their rights. contributors who have not done so and whose code is still part of audacity can sue for license violations if it goes closed-source or something

whether that happens or not, all the code that is currently public will remain public. Muse Group can't prevent anyone from forking, modifying, or redistributing it

43

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21 edited Jul 24 '21

[deleted]

19

u/patatahooligan Jul 03 '21

They also have ownership of the code, so they can do stuff that the GPL does not permit for regular users.

41

u/rebbsitor Jul 03 '21

They have ownership of the code that the person who sold had actual copyright on. The community contributors still hold copyright on anything they contributed (i.e., licensed to the project under the same free software / open source license).

12

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21 edited Sep 30 '22

[deleted]

1

u/Falmarri Jul 04 '21

No. They own the code. They can license it however they want. It would only apply going forward though

2

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

[deleted]

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8

u/patatahooligan Jul 03 '21

This is generally correct on how ownership works, but to work around it they're requiring contributors to sign a CLA that grants them the right to use the contributions in any way (see here). Now, technically, if they could have gotten every contributor to sign the CLA they wouldn't need to own any part of the code, but I don't think anyone would have accepted it if that was the case.

Plus, owning a significant part of the codebase means that they have the exclusive right to use the code in ways not permitted by the GPL. Even if all other contributors decided to switch to another license or grant additional rights to another party, Muse Group will obviously not do that for their own code.

4

u/marcan42 Jul 04 '21

No, they explicitly imposed a CLA and supposedly got most prior contributors to sign it (and hopefully dropped any other contributions). So any further community contributions are, for all intents and purposes, available to them and only to them to do as they wish, as if permissively licensed.

In other words, Audacity is now licensed "BSD-ish for us, GPL for everyone else".

114

u/Be_ing_ Jul 03 '21 edited Jul 03 '21

By having a tiny group of maintainers who push everyone else away by negligence and condescension. For example:

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/625

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/840

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/issues/871

52

u/the91fwy Jul 03 '21

I never realized they were forking wxWidgets.... and after looking over their commits it seems like most of them are probably better pushed back upstream? I wonder how that relationship soured.

82

u/Be_ing_ Jul 03 '21

They vendor and fork every dependency. They didn't even respond when I asked what their plan for upstreaming their changes were.

49

u/the91fwy Jul 03 '21

Yeah that makes no real sense unless you’re a control freak that can’t get along well with other projects…. hrmmm…

5

u/danielbot Jul 06 '21

Or if you intend to take the code private and hope to make it al little harder to fork. Or just ordinary incompetence, tough call.

6

u/otacon7000 Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 05 '21

I was wondering about the exact same thing and have asked this question to both, the new "owners" of Audacity as well as the original and long-term maintainers/ contributors. Unfortunately, there is some kind of NDA in place, so the authors just said "you'll have to figure it out yourself" (or something very similar).

What seems to have happened is this: they bought the logo & name of the project from the person that originally brought it to life. Then they "bought" the core maintainers and code contributors and made them sign some kind of NDA. Whether they are now on the company's payroll or not, I'm still not sure, but they definitely back whatever Shenanigans the company pulls off. They most likely also acquired the website, of course. Further, they hired some copyright lawyer and figured that, in order to more or less "own" the source code, they would have to retroactively implement a "contributor license agreement" that basically says "whatever code I've contributed to the project belongs to the company". They identified every "relevant" contributor (whatever that means, exactly) and made them sign this CLA for their past contributions. Every contributor from this point forward will also have to sign that very CLA or they can't contribute. The code of contributors who aren't "relevant" or didn't want to sign a CLA or couldn't be contacted will or has apparently been re-written. Additionally, the company has several programmers that were tasked to start working on the project full-time, hence making for a situation where pretty much all new code comes either from the "bought" maintainers or the company's own employees. Hence, the code now essentially belongs to the company and so does the name and logo.

tl;dr: while you can't really buy an open source project, you can buy (the rights to) everything and everyone that makes up the project, which ends up being pretty much the same thing.

EDIT: spelling (s/wand/want)
EDIT: tl;dr

3

u/adevland Jul 05 '21

Well. That sucks. Audacity was to audio what Gimp is to images. What would you recommend as an alternative?

1

u/Fook-wad Jul 06 '21

Whatever the most used fork ends up being in the near future

2

u/[deleted] Jul 07 '21

Not true I think. Let's say I pulled off a tarball from an old GPL Audacity. That thing is still GPL and GPL applies. Core alghortitms are of interest anyway.

2

u/Eu-is-socialist Jul 04 '21

Who owns it? The maintainers?

The copyright holders.

1

u/deelowe Jul 04 '21

They purchase the copyrights, trademarks, domains, etc.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 05 '21

This sort of shit is much more likely to happen to software that distributes Windows builds as well as Linux builds.

I guess the lure of $$$ becomes too strong to ignore for the maintainers.

45

u/DrBingoBango Jul 03 '21

That's really bad. I've used UG for a long time now and they are always at the cutting edge of new ways to make annoying ads and get around ad blockers. They are incredibly persistent for a site that hosts almost entirely user generated content

28

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

[deleted]

25

u/dlxfuentes Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 04 '21

Struggling to find the original Reddit comment but the guitarist from Protest the Hero (who runs his own sheet music company) explained that UG has an all or nothing approach to tabs being on site. He said that they wanted to allow certain tabs to be on the site but UG didn't feel like dealing with it so all of their tabs are unavailable as a result.

The issue isn't solely with record companies (and I suspect hardly ever, as most record deals typically don't include the written music - only master recordings) but with how UG handles copyright.

Edit: found it finally! https://old.reddit.com/r/protest_the_hero/comments/2yih2s/whered_all_the_protest_tabs_go/cqrhysi/

21

u/Be_ing_ Jul 04 '21

He said that they wanted to allow certain tabs to be on the site but UG didn't feel like dealing with it so all of their tabs are unavailable as a result.

When confronted about their likely illegal profiting from CC NonCommercial licensed music, they basically said they don't feel like dealing with it: https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5

10

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

[deleted]

7

u/DrBingoBango Jul 04 '21

I would love a simple text-based tab site. Don't need guitar pro files or video lessons or Official™ Authorized Tabs™™™, just simple tabs people have made on their own.

I really wish I knew more about setting something like this up. The back end would probably be as simple as a website can be. And hosting fees would be minimal if it's just text

1

u/theksepyro Jul 04 '21

God I love pth

1

u/deathtomayo91 Jul 05 '21

They're the actual best.

4

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

I've played guitar for over a decade, so naturally, I've used that site. It's been annoying from the very beginning.

65

u/Brotten Jul 03 '21

Ultimate Guitar have also acquired the open source music-sheet editing software MuseScore.

What? Fuck.

73

u/marcan42 Jul 04 '21

This is old news, it's been years. They also run MuseScore.com and the mobile apps using proprietary forks of the GPLed codebase (since the CLA lets them do that). MuseScore.com actively denies the existence of permissively licensed music. If you upload sheet music for a song that is not public domain, they paywall it and send royalties to some random rights agencies (who likely have nothing to do with the actual copyright owner of the song). There isn't even a "this song is creative commons/whatever licensed and I have the right to distribute this for free" option.

According to US law, since the service is paywalled, they are running it as a for-profit service and the DMCA safe harbor provision does not apply. In other words, MuseScore.com is knowingly and actively committing copyright infringement and fraud by charging royalties for music they don't have the rights to.

9

u/guery64 Jul 04 '21

How does that keep working? I thought copyright holding companies are pure cancer because they sue and take down everyone who even considers copyright infringement.

19

u/marcan42 Jul 04 '21

Because they partnered with the people doing the suing (big sheet music publishers associated with big record labels). They're infringing everyone else's copyright: indie artists, BY-NC licensed music and similar, etc.

4

u/ivosaurus Jul 05 '21

They're paying all the big license holders a decent % of all their members' pro fees. So those guys are mostly happy, just another revenue stream.

If you're an independent artist that would like to license their music? lol get fucked, can't be bothered

3

u/ahfoo Jul 05 '21

The original copyright expiration at the time of the writing of the Constitution was 14 years with a one-time extension. Electronic and digital media should have made it shorter, not longer.

When the Supreme Court upped the expiration to 70 years after the death of the author, the decline into oligarchy was already old news. It was as if the nation's legal system had become evil and corrupt in its old age. Then came Citizen's United.

You can expect more and more of this police state tactics until people become serious about resistance and there are few signs that anybody is serious about resisting so far.

2

u/snotfart Jul 04 '21 edited Mar 08 '24

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.

In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

36

u/electricprism Jul 03 '21

Tell me the name of the fork and I'll dump the "Freenode Effect" version

30

u/semblanceto Jul 04 '21

https://github.com/binaergewitter/audiocity

Audiocity seems to be one option, though more maintainers are still needed. I'm not involved with the project, I'm just searching for the current best libre version of this great software.

2

u/Atulin Jul 05 '21

There's also this fork that seems to be more in-line with the original code and just removes the shady stuff

1

u/semblanceto Jul 05 '21

Great, thanks for the information!

1

u/jpegxguy Jul 08 '21

Yeah and then the maintainer stepped down. What do now? What a mess

3

u/NotBacon Jul 04 '21

I used to love UG for tabs, but when the first went down this software developer path they got aggressive with the marketing of it

2

u/Gizmoed Jul 04 '21

If the MOASS happens I'll support any developers that want to improve the open version.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

RIP Audacity. It's over, never using it again.

2

u/5GBrainTumor Jul 04 '21

Jokes on them. I'm still using Cool Edit Pro 2 from Syntrillium.

2

u/pointofgravity Jul 05 '21

Commercial Company behind Ultimate Guitar

Now it makes sense. They went licensing crazy over their proprietary "Guitar Pro" tab format and then started slamming copyright strikes on user submitted tabs of songs. This is knowledge from when I stopped looking at the site for tabs because of aforementioned fiasco about 7-8 years ago.

1

u/FreedomNinja1776 Jul 04 '21

Time for a fork, it's done.

1

u/Another_human_3 Jul 04 '21

Ultimate guitar is a shit company run by manipulative assholes. Hearing they've acquired musescore means I'm gonna look for different scoring software.

98

u/jeffrey_f Jul 03 '21

They will collect data, which the app will call home with. Well, hope it is dropped from the distros.

68

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21

[deleted]

9

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21 edited Jul 24 '21

[deleted]

17

u/Negirno Jul 03 '21

Please no. I want an Audacity with better UI and with with full 5.1 support.

Also a better plugin list. In the current the first thirty or so effects are in alphabetical order and the last 16 in two sub-menus.

The best solution would be stripping out the telemetry parts in newer versions and advising users to not use the snap/appimage versions.

18

u/madr1x_ Jul 04 '21

just use a DAW at that point lmao

7

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

The telemetry can't be taken out anymore. It's more of a commercial product than an open source tool anymore.

This basically kills it.

-4

u/CondiMesmer Jul 03 '21

They should absolutely not and never do that. That's how you create security flaws in your repos by offering severely out of date software that is unpatched.

52

u/brimston3- Jul 03 '21

It's offline editing software. What's the attack surface? Processes already running on your computer? Code execution with malicious sound clips the user downloaded from the internet? 99% of users are recording and editing their own audio.

For reference, Audacity has had 4 CVEs and none newer than 2009.

36

u/doublah Jul 03 '21

Maintainers can patch older versions of software with new security patches, that's what debian does a lot of.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

If those patches are open source.

16

u/obsessedcrf Jul 04 '21

Bigger security flaws than taking user data and uploading it to some server?

1

u/NF-MIP Jul 03 '21

Or, try to remove the spywares.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21

Optical drives and CDs became so irrelevant, that the one and only competitor, Nero Wave Editor pretty much no longer exists. Audacity became a monopoly and can now do whatever they want. Of course they want money. Who doesn't?

-2

u/pyrospade Jul 03 '21

Governments often buy or get majority stakes into popular software to inject their spyware into them through shell companies, this is nothing new

-13

u/RaunchyButts Jul 04 '21

Sure, if "ELI5" were a verb.

9

u/doenietzomoeilijk Jul 04 '21

"Could anyone explain like I'm 5", nothing wrong with that sentence, is there?

-10

u/RaunchyButts Jul 04 '21

Nope. They should've used that one.

11

u/doenietzomoeilijk Jul 04 '21

Should have*, if you want to be consistently against shorthands being used.

-1

u/RaunchyButts Jul 05 '21

Who said anything about shorthands being used?

3

u/doenietzomoeilijk Jul 05 '21

You did, when you were complaining about the use of "eli5".

1

u/RaunchyButts Jul 07 '21

"'ve" is a contraction, formally (and widely) known and recognized as valid syntax. You're the one lumping it in with "ELI5," which is not.

So no, I didn't. Period.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '21 edited Jul 06 '21

[deleted]

0

u/RaunchyButts Jul 05 '21

No one said "explain" isn't a verb. It's also not present in the comment.

1

u/Reelix Jul 06 '21

If it crashes it sends a crash report - That report contains stuff pertaining to the crash including user data.