[htns]

Why would anyone acquire it except to turn it into malware? I can't recall a project that wasn't built for commercial success from the start being bought for any other reason. I guess sourceforge stopping malware bundling could count.

[alkonaut]

I don’t doubt that’s what’s happening but I’m curious if/how it can be a good business decision

[Applejinx]

Business profit doesn't have to be a global value. If Audacity is purchased at value X and pillaged in such a way that you can get a third party to pay you value Y for what you did to/with it, and Y > X, that's profitable depending on how much effort/expense you had to go to during that process.

Doesn't have anything to do with even Audacity's users, much less the sustainability of the Audacity ecosystem. If there exists somebody somewhere who would pay more to see Audacity scuttled than it'd cost to buy, that becomes a potential profit motive to a facilitating third party if they know of that dynamic out there to be exploited.

This is of course subject to whether it's allowed to just wreck stuff for your benefit, and how. In cases of simple property, it's generally not: you can't just burn down a rival store to benefit yourself because that's against the rules.

I don't think such limitations currently apply to businesses past a certain level of abstraction, and what's happening to Audacity is not in the least meant as 'just burn it down', even if that's what happens: it's meant as 'get more control over this property', for whatever reason. That may or may not be a wise business decision, but in terms of being able to extract profit, it's a good business decision if in any way, for any reason, it works to get them more money than they paid for the property.

I think it's a very bad decision in the larger sense of things in the world, ability to trust in the things we know about, ability to function within larger systems of known properties and build order out of chaos for the sake of real progress. But that wasn't the question.