Tantacrul who has been working with Muse Score for a while now to improve their UX will also be working on Audacity. They also plan to hire some full time devs.
Well worth watching his other videos too, even if you don’t use musical notation software. Funny and insightful commentary on software usability in general.
> OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this.
True, Blender really exploded when they re-designed the interface. I hope someday GIMP team understand that. The software is solid, but the interface isn't great. Some very simple workflow changes made Blender easier to use.
I would say the GIMP team does understand that and they often put a high focus on UI improvements on their roadmaps. I suppose they just have limited resources to work with.
I really just wish GIMP (and Audacity now that I think about it) had a command palette, where I could type in the name of anything found in the menu or assigned to a keyboard shortcut. I don’t use both of them a lot so all of my time is spent search menus for what I am trying to do.
BTW, MacOS has this feature for menus in all apps: at the top of the ‘Help’ menu is a search field. Also invoked with cmd-? (i.e. cmd-shift-/ on my keyboard). The highlighted menu item is then triggered with ‘enter’—so for touch-typists this is way faster than using the mouse.
Anyone care to chime in about why Blender seems to have the resources for this kind of work but the GIMP doesn’t?
I know Blender has a lot of corporate sponsorship, so I think the explanation is there’s a “commoditize your complements” effect going on. But does anyone have a more specific hypothesis? E.g., why does Blender have so many complements and the GIMP so few?
I’m not hugely involved in this space so this is just speculation, but my impression is that Blender is relied on by companies more than GIMP. It seems like Photoshop still dominates the space GIMP occupies. So there’s probably just a lot more money being funneled into Blender because a lot more profit depends on it.
Maybe because there are relatively fewer options for free modeling software, compared to the tons of free 2D graphics programs one can choose from? Putting money into Blender helps those companies getting rid of buggy, expensive 3D software. For 2D graphics, they already have plenty of options.
One thing I don't understand is the move to monochrome icons. I'm really bloody good at recognizing shape+color combinations; the old icons were ugly, but I was able to find the tool I wanted in an instant. After the redesign of the icon pack, I always find myself slowly iterating through every icon in the toolbox to try to find the particular abstract monochrome shape I want.
I think a redesign of the icons was necessary, because the old ones don't look amazing. But you can make tasteful icons which are also colorful and recognizable.
(And I know you can switch icon themes, but when we're talking about UX, we're largely talking about the out-of-the-box experience. 99.9% of users are going to stick with the default icon pack.)
It’s odd that you singled out Gimp as they are the only free software project I’m aware of who engaged a professional UX consultant to redesign their UI, and that must be maybe 15 years ago
Gimp is great, but it’s also the UI that I think of when I think of OSS that lacks finish. Hiring a UX consultant one time, 15 years ago, isn’t how people realize a good user experience. That’s why companies employ UI / UX engineers full time…
> True, Blender really exploded when they re-designed the interface.
So this must be what happened... over and over I've heard about people switching to Blender now, even many professionals. I tried it many many years ago and found it, quite honestly, awful.
I guess I should download it again and see how things have changed.
The issue is that many designers and engineers loathe Usability and Accessibility people (like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman).
For me, it all started with Don Norman's excellent book The Design of Everyday Things[0] (nee The Psychology of Everyday Things).
Reading that book changed the way that I view the world. I can't walk through a door, anymore, without evaluating its affordances and usability.
The challenge (for me) is melding usability and aesthetics. In my experience, designing and implementing a truly usable software interface is hard. It's also highly iterative. A lot of "running things up the flagpole" stuff. I throw out a lot of code, and slaughter a lot of sacred cows.
It's true that there often exists a clash between designers and those who champion accessibility standards. IMO, this is normally because the designer in question hasn't enough experience working on software. Speaking for myself? I designed the accessibility features in Paint 3D while at Microsoft. I was in charge of accessibility of another Microsoft Studio that worked on Hololens software.
For MuseScore 4 (currently in development), I have made sure that every bit of UI passes web accessibility contrast standards and I have designed a new 'High Contrast Mode' which is being implemented right now. In addition, myself and another member of the UKAAF (Peter Jonas) have designed a far better focus state / keyboard navigation system into MS4 than MS3 had. This will enable much better screen reader support and will also help with ongoing efforts to introduce Braille support too.
I'm not one of those designers. But I do sympathise with the concern. I see it all the time!
I would also recommend Emotional Design by the same author. It's a follow-up book that has been very useful for me to understand that great design isn't just usable and accessible, but should also be beautiful, and should respect that what people build using software are not just files on a storage system but often their most personally meaningful things.
For a long time nielsen groups webpage was one of the uglier websites on the web in the name of accessibility. That's part of where mistrust of them specifically comes from.
I think it’s a culture change on the developer side. I was exposed to UI UX about fifteen years ago and worked with a number of terrific designers who put users first. The problem is as devs the job can feel overwhelming enough and then when you get to a point you feel is done, now you have someone telling you you need to redo it. It’s an egoless thing one has to develop and we don’t necessarily encourage that. I think the number of people who get to Beginners Mind as devs is as much Survivorship Bias as anything else.
Yeah, I think the definition of "done" is a great thing to focus on here. For me, the definition is generally, "works for the user". But waterfall-ish processes encourage developers to think that done means "finished the code". But that's really "finished the code for their first understanding of somebody's first guess at what might solve a user problem".
If something isn't "done" until it has at least survived a first user test, then we don't need to be quite as egoless, because we are a participant in the larger problem-solving process.
I also think your point on being overwhelmed matters a lot. Too many software processes are push-based, where an executive is cramming things in the hopper and insisting on a pace. I like pull-based processes. E.g., having a kanban board with WIP limits, so an individual unit of work takes as long as it takes.
IMO the problem is that OSS developers hate any change that’s made to a UI because it breaks their workflow. As a result, a lot of OSS has old style interfaces, and it’s hard for UI designers to convince the others to make changes.
I think that more accurate would be saying is that OSS is often developed by people already using it and used to weird interface and not benefiting from it being usable by newbies.
So there is much smaller motivation to improve it.
And avoiding change for the sake of change is something that I actually like. One of reasons why I switched to LibreOffice and later to Linux is because I am not fan of relearning interface without a good reason.
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But nearly every software would benefit from running small scale UX test. Take three people, ask them to do the most basic tasks - and fix the most common problems.
Your software is much harder to use than you expect.
Related is this: sometimes you have been using a piece of software for such a long time you can no longer judge whether the user-interface (UI) is any good. You've simply mastered the steps (and keyboard shortcuts) needed to accomplish a task and it now feels "natural", no matter how clunky or clumsy the steps remain.
And there's also a widespread belief among developers that making a task easier in the UI means "dumbing down" the UI. Or that making software easier to use means it could never satisfy "power users".
Developers love to revel in arcane interface minutiae (especially for command-line tools). They think it's equal to acquiring a skill or knowledge. But it's not really. Instead, it is the perpetration of a clumsy method to completing a task. But now that the developer has mastered that method (and that feeling of "knowledge" gained as a consequence), they won't easily let go. Or be easily persuaded of a different method.
Instead, it is the perpetration of a clumsy method to completing a task.
Not in every case. For experienced/professional/power users of any software, what matters is maximizing the information density in time of both input and output. Sometimes the best way to do that appears arcane.
I want to be able to accomplish much in as little time as possible, so I want a high temporal input information density. So that might mean using a mouse instead of a trackpad for precise aiming and scrolling, or using keyboard shortcuts instead of on-screen icons. It might mean there are different mouse behaviors for ctrl-drag, middle-click-drag, etc.
I also want to be able to receive as much information about the state of the application as possible in as little time as possible. Too little density and I have to keep more state in my head and spend time jumping around. Too much density and the senses are overwhelmed. This might mean, for a CLI tool, that zero output is the best output in case of success. But for long-running processes that might be a progress bar under a list of log entries. For GUIs, the optimum might mean that there is a lot of information and a lot of actions on screen with reduced whitespace, which seems intimidating at first but is necessary to communicate the state of the system to the user.
So convincing any power user to "let go" is like asking someone to give up their legs for a scooter. Sure, it's simpler to go places in mostly straight lines with a scooter, but linear motion is only one of the many things people do with their legs that justify the arcane UI of unstable bipedal locomotion. We walk along streets, run along trails, jump over obstacles, dance, spar, climb, swim, etc.
This is not to say that scooters have no place, or that every tool is at a global optimum. But any "different method" that someone wants to propose will very deservedly receive pushback if it does not fulfill the full purpose of the old method.
A good example is the UI of Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, which is not at all intuitive. I was incredibly confused when I first started using them, and it took me a long time to become proficient. But now I've mastered them, the absolute last thing I want is for them to do a UI overhaul.
I do not hate when an application I use revamp its UI (e.g. Pixelmator -> Pixelmator Pro). However, developing good UX is as hard as developing robust code and high performance algorithms.
Unless the devs get UX improvement backwards (cough GNOME cough), there's nothing to worry IMHO. OTOH, for a CLI application, backwards compatibility and/or graceful depreciation is key.
Modern "UX" is just a failed premise. It favors hand holding for the novice, which someone won't remain forever, over efficiency and control for the experienced user.
"Old style" interfaces are universally better than tabletized crap, and had as much and higher quality research into the choices behind them. It's not limited to OSS. Apple is a glaring example of that right now. The Mac Human Interface Guidelines and the thought that went into the Mac OS were phenomenal. Contemporary style changes driven by users' familiarity with tabletized (or dare I say "Fischer-Price") UIs are regressions. Visible things become hidden to look "cleaner," keyboard control is ignored, oversized buttons are favored.
Much of OSS UI/UX however does not follow such excellent guidelines, but is rather a kitchen sink, and that does not in truth well serve either power users nor novice. As you are suggesting, the design must have thoughtful work applied.
I love those blender tutorial videos, were they dont even bother to tell you were in the menue the button is for something, and instead go "press key x y z" - though 2.8 has greatly improved the whole affair.
This should in theory allow for a complete redesign of the gui though, as the core audience uses shortkeys anyway.
Its also from the facts that almost every "redesign" or presentation for one, is often full regression in use ability terms.
It does help when software users that happen to have good UI chops suggest redesign because then it often improves things, as I've seen happen with KDE and Budgie, at least. But pulling in UX "designers" who have no skin in the game and letting them play around is how you get ridiculous unusable crap like Google Pay, Apple Music, Windows 8, whatever Google is calling their Android UI now, and more.
I think a good approach sometimes is to decouple UI from other things as much as possible, then make "classic" UI optional for the people who value that while the improvements are worked on separately. It depends on the project if that just ends up being too much of a hassle or not.
What I find difficult is the lack of communication. Programming UI changes is hard work, and when a developer isn’t convinced of the benefit to users, it makes it seem like the change is being made for the ego of the UX designer.
Thank you for the Sibelius video link. It's very good indeed.
The thing is (unmentioned in Tantacrul's Audacity video) is that Audacity's UI has always - from day one - been a terrible copy of the much beloved SoundEdit16, afaict. I just want something as easy to use as SoundEdit was, if Tantacrul is reading.
I wish so too! Being a UI/UX person who has an eye for good design, I'd love to contribute to OSS projects.
I think a lot more OSS projects should reach out for contributions in improving usability — it's almost always what separates OSS projects from paid alternatives.
Does anyone know what this means? The code is GPL v2. It has 126 contributors on github. The project doesn't seem to use copyright assignment. What has been acquired?
MuseScore is also GPL, so I assume there is no intent to attempt to change the license. This probably is more about the organization, funding, direction, etc.
This is how the Bukkit disaster happened. Microsoft "bought" the leading Minecraft server software, hiring some of the major developers and I guess not telling anyone else, and some of them were unamused that they were (in their eyes) doing free work for Microsoft when their colleagues got hired. So they rescinded their GPL licensing of their contributions and sent DMCA notices. Which pretty much ended the project, except for Spigot continuing development in the form of patches that the server operator applies with a script.
It should be noted that the authors didn't rescind any licenses, per se. Rather, distributing binary versions of Bukkit was always in violation of the GPL (since the bundled Mincraft code did not have source available). The former author simply started enforcing this. Important distinction since rescinding the license would be a far more legally/ethically dubious action.
The license covers the code, not the trademark. You can use the code/software as long as you observe the license, you can use the trademark as long as you follow the rules set out by the trademark owner. E.g. you can totally use the code to make your own audio editor and distribute it, but the trademark terms might not allow you to call it "Audacity".
Trademarks are actually still useful for open-source software, since they ensure that a malicious or incompetent party can't ruin the name of your software by shipping a modification that does bad things.
Jason Rohrer ran into this very issue when other developers made their own client for his game, using a variation on the game's name. They didn't respond to him asking that they don't use the name, and eventually he was convinced that trademarking the name is the right tool to project it. The original game client is still open-source (and maybe the server too, dunno).
GPL isn't "do whatever you want". It's "do whatever you want, as long as you let future users do whatever they want". That's what makes it such a good licence for the community.
Well, imagining it from the buyer's perspective, if I bought Audacity then now I can make changes to it and while there may be other forks, these changes will be likely be recognized as "the" Audacity.
So if for example I wanted to cross-promote my other products or add a "pro" paid version of some sort, I could do that, and those would end up in the main version most people are downloading.
Not saying they are doing this, but the copyright owner can fork the GPL work and create a closed source version if they want to. The GPL doesn't restrict the copyright owner in any way.
But as GP mentioned, the project has 126 contributors on GitHub who each own part of the copyright. So Muse Group doesn't own the full copyright of Audacity now.
>But as GP mentioned, the project has 126 contributors on GitHub who each own part of the copyright
Not sure about this case, but iirc you can have contributors to a project without them owing "part of the copyright" for the stuff they wrote. You just have to make them assign the copyright to you if they want to include their code in the project (they can always fork if they don't like that, but the original authors still get the copyright to the core project).
Also, and orthogonal, a lot of time there are 1-2-5-10 core devs, and the rest 100s are just some small changes here and there, fixes to the documentation, some plugin contribution, etc. In other words, easily writen out, if it comes to that.
Yes, I suppose they would have to back up time and take an earlier branch where the number of significant contributors was much smaller and easier to cull down.
If they wanted to do that there's no need to get an ok from 100 or so devs, because you only need a working version, not to be able to use avery single release with the new license. VLC was able to do it (albeit the change was from gpl to lgpl), there's probably 10 or so devs that owns 80% or so percent of the copyrighted code from the current version, once you get those to agree with the change, in the worst case you have to rewrite 20% of your software.
My first reaction was "oh no..". Audacity has to be one of the most beloved and widely recommended software of all time. It's not often that an aquisition like this goes well for very long.
After looking at MuseScore and UltimateGuitar, however, it looks like they are also free and have a similar aesthetic to Audacity. Maybe this will work out after all.
What scares me is musescore.com. That website went from being a largely free repository of sheet music to a subscription service paying into the music industry, with no support for CC style licenses (it's either public domain or paywalled), locking everyone's sheet music retroactively behind a paywall regardless of actual license, sometimes in violation of said licenses (e.g. anything with a BY-NC or similar style license). None of the profits go to independent creators, only to a few major rights associations, regardless of who actually owns the music. They then tried to threaten folks who had written download tools with vague and ridiculous threats. [1]
It seems these days they support CC (finally...), but not any ad-hoc or third party licenses. So most of the music I'm interested in, which is legal to distribute sheet music of for free but not commercially (but under a non-CC license), is still paywalled in violation of its copyright.
MuseScore the software is fine, but the MuseScore.com fiasco has left a really bad taste in my mouth. I hope none of that nonsense bleeds over into the development teams of the actual OSS software, but absent any kind of apology or change of direction MuseScore.com, I'm scared.
> 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.
This is by far the worst takedown request I've ever seen in Github. The physically find you is especially concerning, since the owner of the repository seems to be a Chinese national.
Apparently by the time the takedown was written, the API was public but the documentation was taken down. The next replies don't make it better, and it seems they don't have a leg to stand on to send a proper DMCA.
I also had no idea they belonged to Ultimate Guitar. Honestly I lost some of the respect I had for MuseScore and Audacity teams after seeing this.
The way the issue is worded is not how things work in the civilised world.
The affected parties have first to prove or at least argue that the software is doing anything illegal. The repository owners were using a documented, public, authenticated, third party API that was only taken down after the issue was posted. This is not illegal.
If there were anything illegal like piracy happening, it should have been resolved is by having the affected parties send a DMCA to GitHub, just like in the YouTube-dl situation, just like the repo owner asked Daniel J. Rey to do.
This is how it's done. Not by sending lies ("illegally using our private API" that was actually publicly documented) and making mafia-like threats ("will physically find you").
If you are committing crimes in China, the police (i.e. the Chinese government) will find you and stop you. I don't know why this is a point of contention. That is a fact.
If the API was protected in any way, the usage can fall under anti-circumvention. That's how the DMCA works. This is also a fact.
We can dispute what actually happened, and we can dispute invididual laws in China (or in EU, or the US), but your assertions seem to be suggesting that it's wrong that these things happen at all, which is not true.
> 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.
It's not like he's reporting them to the Gestapo for termination.
He's reporting them to the police of a country for a copyright complaint. The fact that the country is China doesn't mean anything ominous.
Besides the "state persecution" thing, there's regular police and court work in China, every day, for 1.6 billion people, and millions of criminal, civic, business disputes, and other such cases, which is where this will fall into.
That it's China probably makes it even lighter, not harder, since copyright abuses there are seen much more lightly than in the west.
musescore.com has some dark patterns in the their pricing, too. Just 2 weeks ago, when I couldn't find out how much it costs, I asked my friend circle. They pointed me to some indirect references to how much it costs, but it's not out there in front. You also have to make an account in order to see the price.
Plus musescore.com has numerous shenanigans with payment, ending subscriptions, etc [0]
It leads me to wonder, what is the other side of this deal? Will muscore.com repeat what they did with the free musescore software and utilize it to ensnare a large number of community resources? What kind of deal are the Audacity devs getting offered? I hope tantacrul doesn't become the face of a dumpsterfire.
I found it amusing that the originator of the takedown email commented with this:
>We are genuinely committed to open source and do want to make as much as possible as free as possible. The fact that I am sitting here and writing in these discussions at all should be evidence of our commitment to open source and engagement vs. simply passing the issue on to lawyers to deal with.
And then this next (and final) comment ended with this:
The copyright holders should just upload the sheet music to a different website. There is no requirement for anyone to redistribute a piece of Creative Commons content for free. That's true even with the NC licenses, in that case, the only real option for non-compliance is for the copyright holder to file a takedown notice to get the material removed. I know it seems counter-intuitive since you probably want to download that music, but this is what you're actually asking for.
If the copyright holders are absent then not much is going to be done about this -- that's one of the major reasons why artists join these large copyright holding organizations, to handle this stuff for them!
I'm sorry, I don't understand. Can you explain what you mean by that? Then more broadly, can you explain how the creation of more GPL-licensed source code can ever be a bad thing?
An extreme example since you asked a very absolute question:
I sell software to the Chinese government to track down dissidents and kill them with drones. I release a lot of code under a GPL license and use the funds to promote OSS software. Most people wouldn't consider this a positive for the world even though more GPL software is created. Or in other words many people do not believe that "the ends justify the means" is a valid reason for something.
Essentially it boils down to this: if you see value to society in allowing people to share musical scores with each other, that's fundamentally at odds with a libre software philosophy. Because if you let people share music on a platform, they will inevitably share copyrighted melodies, which means not only that you are forced to monetize to be able to strike licensing arrangements, or else be sued into oblivion. And you are also required to enforce that the sharing software be used as intended in order to placate rightsholders, or else be sued into oblivion. And it's that "as intended" that is fundamentally different from how many of us think about FOSS.
There's a lot of corporate speak in the official post here related to the emplacement of score downloads behind the paywall in the first place https://musescore.com/groups/improving-musescore-com/discuss... but it's the same sentiment: if MuseScore.com doesn't put in place paywalls for downloads and enforce them, they will lose their ability to negotiate with major music publishers, and they see that outcome being a net loss to society of access to digital scores.
Frankly, I think this is a reasonable tradeoff. MuseScore sees monetization and adherence to these restrictions as a necessary step to ensure they have the resources and community to promote music literacy. That's a distinct mission from, say, GNU's mission, and just as valid. And of all the corporations using GPL for visions distinct from GNU's vision (here's looking at you, AWS), this one at least has a reason beyond being a naked cash grab.
The discussion stops being nuanced as soon as the company starts the discussion with a threat such as "will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content".
At the point the email in the Github issue was written the API was public. It was removed after the repository owner responded, as can be seen on the Internet Archive.
Nothing ever justifies offering a public API and getting people to use it, to only later backtrack, accuse users of "stealing" and threaten developers with use of physical force.
If the problem is caused by major industries, then just remove the previously public API and don't send mafia-like threats.
This seems misdirected to me. Not all principled stances can be fairly compared to religious zealotry. Standing up for the rights of users strikes me as pretty useful.
One of the takedown emails to a Github repository owner says "who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content".
I think any reasonable person would find this unethical mafia-like behaviour.
Possibly relevant, MuseScore has a CLA requiring that all code contributors grant MuseScore the right to use the code in proprietary software. Audacity doesn't have such a clause and I don't know if they'll be able to get past contributors to sign such an agreement.
Beloved is a little too strong of word choice for me.
The UI is garbage. The plugin architecture is rough. It's difficult to workflow -- no automation is really available. Audacity produces good results, at the cost of an insanely high requirement for patience and experience. What you are actually in love with is the creative process of editing and creating audio.
As a project, audacity has languished for a long time. It has the potential to be great -- but it's not there, now.
The great about Audacity it's that it's a great DAW starter. You can record, edit, multitrack, mix and apply effects.
It's fast, out of the box, multiplatform... and I haven't used it in years, but that's mostly because Reaper it's too great, the only thing I miss it's audacity loading times.
Now I think Audacity has only a few bottlenecks, the main workflow it's not that broken.
If what they say it's accomplished and they prioritize VTS non-destructive effects, improve the Timeline management and other UX details. I could see Audacity present in the majority of home studios and the software behind a lot of professional works (not big studios, but enough for self publish). I now a couple of local bands that recorded their demo with audacity, a cheap interface and a sm57 mic.
...and if I can ask maybe add support for ASIO (something hard to happen becauses licences, but I can dream).
Much agreed on the history of Audacity. It has so much capability, but it's high time we fixed UIs that inspire anger or still depend on Athena widgets.
Obviously it does what it does well. It can edit audio quickly. I'll never use it for anything else aside from chopping up samples. If you want a full DAW use Logic.
UltimateGuitar is a horrible website full of dirty UX to force certain behaviors and block others. You wanted to zoom in on a tab? That's a paid subscription feature! Trying to browse on your phone while at a practice session with your band? Download our app, so we can track you, show you ads and prevent other basic functionality! They're constantly changing these and implementing new paywalls and ways to ruin their product while the core experience of tabs never improves.
I fully agree. Trying to use the browser version of ultimate guitar on a 6 inches smartphone is a very frustrating experience. I remember subscribing to the pro version of ultimate guitar about 5 years ago when the app was a must go and in my opinion, it's just been downwards since then
I use it because it does have a lot of songs. The search on it is the worst and the UI has its own back button that is not easy to use. Most good apps on Android let you use the devices back button.
I'm quite concerned about this. I use Audacity quite heavily and have for many years. It's become an important part of my workflow. I'm not opposed to it in theory but after seeing how they handled Muse Score, I really worry about how Muse Group will attempt to monetize Audacity.
If anybody has insight into the plans, I'd love to hear them.
Once you get past the cute intro it’s a really great history of audacity, interview with some of the creators, and an overview of the ui challenges the new head of ui/ux has to face (keep it simple, but make it powerful, etc.)
I don't need that, I need to know what is going to happen to an important piece of software I rely on to do my work, and which is one of the only quality free software options for.
A big argument/selling point of the FOSS model has always been that it's compatible with capitalism. You are allowed to sell your software and build it as part of a commercial entity; the only difference is that you have to share the source code to anyone you sell to. There's no reason any company developing FOSS can't be bought/sold.
Seems like they’re just hiring the maintainer and maybe their copyrights. Given the number of contributors, not sure how useful one persons contributions are.
Sounds like they want to connect it to their cloud services and improve the UI. They say in the comments they’re not looking to relicense and it’s hard to see how they could.
> Given the number of contributors, not sure how useful one persons contributions are.
OTOH, they are probably not spending too much money as a result. While acquiring better visibility and (hopefully) more goodwill from the audio enthusiast community.
You can buy the copyright from the copyright holder(s). That seems quite straightforward if the holder is a single entity, like with Qt, for example. If it's multiple entities, as with Audacity, then in theory it's no different, but practically speaking I'm not sure how they have done this.
They probably hired the main developers and have the copyrights for their work transferred to them. In practice, it has no meaningful impact since relicensing is (nearly) impossible due to the distributed copyright among all contributors of Audacity (which is a good thing!).
Then "Main Audacity developers hired by Muse Group" seems like a sensible headline. I'm not sure why they went with this headline. Maybe they sold it to their bosses in simple terms like "we're acquiring Audacity"?
Wasn't Expressjs the framework acquired by some company? It seems simple, a company take control of the official repository/webpage from its original author/developer in exchange for money.
Read the comment from Daniel Ray under the article. In short, Muse Group seems to be planning to continue their established business model for Audacity and possibly other future acquisitions. That is, offering standalone open source software with optional paid cloud services.
Audacity lacks very few features IMO. Maybe a revamp on broken plugins and suport to drum sequencing. More than that will force the daw to change UI paradigm, a thing that will hurt badly in usability. The big reason Audacity is so successful is how easy it is to beginners to use.
There's an example up higher in the thread of them being jerks to a developer and threatening to send the government of a user after them for providing access to things via APIs they provided
Source: https://youtu.be/RMWNvwLiXIQ
Well worth watching his other videos too, even if you don’t use musical notation software. Funny and insightful commentary on software usability in general.