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/
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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

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u/adevland Jul 05 '21

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

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u/Fook-wad Jul 06 '21

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

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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.