- DarkAudacity, was mostly a fork by Audacity's own lead dev for experimenting on things which might be too disruptive or polarising for the main project, that ended up being largely reincorporated in Audacity
- After acquiring the project, Muse Group drafted a proposal to add invasive telemetry and age restrictions, this led to a few forks and ultimately a reversal of course; soon after the privacy policy changed to add notes about personal data extraction to Russia and the USA, there was more outcry and this was reverted as well
there was also some bit about a third party developer using their API to build something and they threatened to have him deported to China when he was a vocal anti CCP activist, essentially threatening him with jail/death if he didn't take down his project.
I wonder, how does "acquiring" a open source project work? Does it mean the company acquires assets like Name, Trademark, Domain and such? Since the code itself is open source. (Sure you might be able to get rights to the owner's code)
And even after that won't the company itself have to start putting telemetry and stuff themselves since prexisting maintainers definately won't do that. It feels pretty much like a Hostile takeover than acquiring. How do they even benefit from it
This is a possibility if diplomacy fails. But diplomacy and dialog should happen first. Going public and publishing this open letter is a sign that other forms of diplomacy did not work (including private messages).
Although people secretly created the company month ago, the first public hint of its existence showed when someone inadvertently mentioned being bound by an NDA. Which raised questions that they could not answer... because they were bound by an NDA.