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.