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>Ah, so it's really about making it harder for other players to improve their product? No, it's about keeping those improvements open source. >As for Audacity
by CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
>Ah, so it's really about making it harder for other players to improve their product?
No, it's about keeping those improvements open source.
>As for Audacity - the exact same thing would have happened with any other Open Source license; GPL doesn't make it any easier.
Yes, it does make it a lot easier since the Muse Group (assuming they don't own all copyright of Audacity, if they do the license doesn't indeed really matter) has to release all improvements as GPL and the fork can simply cherry-pick them. With a MIT/BSD style license they could just make it proprietary and then we would be stuck having to choose between an outdated Audacity and a non-free Audacity.
- trasz 5y agoThey can’t make it proprietary, because the developers would then go with the open fork. In this case GPL protects you from a scenario which cannot happen for other reasons.
- CorrectHorseBat 5y agoBut the improvements they make wouldn't be open source so the open source version would lack those features, which means we would be stuck having to choose between an outdated Audacity and a non-free Audacity.
- trasz 5y agoOpen Source developers would develop closed version instead of the open one? How?
- CorrectHorseBat 5y agoMuse Group bought Audacity and are developing it now, their developers will use whatever license their employer tells them to use. They are the main developers of Audacity now. Any fork will have to compete with their work.