4 ms·
A bit off-topic, but in all the posts surrounding Muse Group acquiring Audacity, including the one you linked, I never understood why people keep saying things
by franga2000 5y ago
A bit off-topic, but in all the posts surrounding Muse Group acquiring Audacity, including the one you linked, I never understood why people keep saying things like "what does it even mean for a company to acquire a FOSS project?" or "a company can't acquire anything other than the trademark".
Well of course they can acquire a project. To acquire the project doesn't just mean the trademarked name, but also the rights to call their version the official version, the official website to distribute their builds on, "BDFL" status including write access to the canonical VCS repository and the right to accept or reject pull requests (unless, of course, the project doesn't have different governance policies in place).
They might also acquire the right to the previous owner's source code, which means that they could (assuming they re-wrote all the other parts that were written by other contributors) dual-license the project (without violating the GPL).
- LegitShady 5y agoThey should outright state what they bought, who they are, what their plans are, etc. As of now, it's fishy. Uncertain. They should just state outright what's happening and why. https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5 https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5 Here is some interesting activity by musescore threatening another developer over things musescore didn't have any rights over. I dont trust them. They don't act like people worthy of trust.
- mmastrac 5y agoI am also curious about this. The attitude in both of these cases suggests to me there's a either a cultural or leadership issue at the company.
- denotational 5y ago> but also the rights to call their version the official version I'm not entirely sure what this really means beyond the protections already afforded by the trademark.
- throwaway2037 5y agoThis is one of the key open source strategies used by Red Hat, Microsoft, Intel, Google, etc. I am not implying anything nefarious here. (Cygwin, a product of Red Hat, specifically advertises on their commercial license page how many core contributors for various open source projects work for Red Hat. This allows them to quickly fix bugs for major customers.) In short, if there is a very important open source project, you hire a lead developer from the project who has commit access to the main repo.