Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 10, 2021 10:46 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
Parent article: Another misstep for Audacity

So a private company "buy" a free software project that in no way generates revenue and that they could just use for free by following the GPL.
What is their purpose ? How will they make money from it ?
How will they recoup their investment ?
Unless there are a clear plan going forward, the prudent thing is to move as fast as possible from such project. You cannot trust a company whose only obvious path forward is to screw you.
It is not like it is the first time it happens.

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 10, 2021 20:10 UTC (Sat) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link] (8 responses)

I have no idea how they are making or planning to make money, they have acquired a lot of open source software over the years though: https://mu.se/muse-products so one could perhaps look at some of the early ones like MuseScore and see what they have done with that. My guess is that they are selling some form of support but it's hard do deduce from their website since it contains virtually zero information on what they actually do.

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 11, 2021 8:53 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

... but selling support for free software does not require to buy them outright.
So we are back to square one...

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 11, 2021 12:21 UTC (Sun) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

I would imagine it helps, though, especially if the software has a large Windows userbase which acquires the software directly from the original vendor.

If one of Muse's support customers wants X, but upstream rejects Muse's patch for X, customer will not get what they want unless they use Muse's fork, which Muse must now keep up to date with upstream.

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 18, 2021 16:43 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

> so one could perhaps look at some of the early ones like MuseScore and see what they have done with that

No, that would trying to get some facts. The Internet is not very interested about these, their potential for new outrage is too often too limited, they tend to cause very mild outrage at best.

Even old outrages are not interesting enough. Take for instance BigPharma: there are known bad behaviors there but they're not news so not interesting, you need something brand new to be exciting like some new COVID or vaccine conspiracy.

> > It would also be nice if the Internet would learn to damp its reactions a bit — but there seems to be little hope of that.

Propaganda and crazies are never going to leave the Internet but I have some hope that the next generations who grew up with them will learn and become a bit more cautious _resharing_.

Do you remember chain letters? These are gone aren't they?

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 18, 2021 21:31 UTC (Sun) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (1 responses)

> Do you remember chain letters? These are gone aren't they?
"The Chain Letter Is Back, and Just as Annoying as Before"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/style/chain-letters-co...

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 18, 2021 23:53 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Interesting thanks! Two quotes though:

> Ann Shoket, 47, the author of “The Big Life” and former editor of Seventeen magazine, said these challenges give her a sense of belonging. “People are desperate for community,” she said. “They want to know other people are out there and paying attention to them.”

> But generally quarantine-era chain letters are milder than they were two or three decades ago, when harsh punishments were predicted for breaking the thread; maybe a family member would die or you would have bad sex for 10 years. “There is no threat in these contemporary versions,” Ms. Mockler said.
> Perhaps that’s because there is plenty of threat outside.

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 26, 2021 19:12 UTC (Mon) by yxejamir (subscriber, #103429) [Link] (2 responses)

My understanding is that Musescore is monetized by sharing subscription revenue with artists, who offer their scores for download in source form, i.e. in Musescore's native file format.

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 27, 2021 17:48 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I believe the reason Musescore is so widely despised is that a large part of their paywalled library consists of Creative Commons license violations where neither the copyright holder nor uploader sees a share of the revenue, as it all goes into the pockets of their middle managers and commercial music industry parasites.

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 27, 2021 23:03 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

It started out hosting a bunch of pirated material before it got a commercial framework - a great deal of the rage is from one person who is adamant that no longer allowing access to pirated material for free is "illegal", in his words.

Another misstep for Audacity

Posted Jul 13, 2021 7:18 UTC (Tue) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

Adding spyware and ads, allegedly.