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Free software does not only belong to the core developers, but also to the other contributors, and to the community that uses, relies upon, and popularizes the

• IshKebab 5y ago
  It belongs to whoever owns the repo, domain, copyright and trademarks. That's usually the core developers. Users don't own it at all. Not legally anyway. It they're upset about the sale they can fork it if they want - that's one of the great things about FOSS. But that doesn't mean it was a "hostile takeover".
  • ddevault 5y ago
    It legally belongs to the contributors, who retain the copyright for their contributions except in case of a CLA - which in the case of Audacity was added later, and never comprehensively covered all of the code written over the past 20 years of the project's life. It also philosophically belongs to the users, as part of the social contract of FOSS. I strongly object to CLAs for this reason, and encourage you not to contribute to projects which use them. It is a clear signal that the upstream maintainers of a project intend to leverage the FOSS community to build up the product and then take it away from them to build a nonfree project instead. I wrote about something similar here: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-belong-to-Elastic.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...
    • IshKebab 5y ago
      > It legally belongs to the contributors, who retain the copyright for their contributions except in case of a CLA That's true, and those copyrights were not sold.
      • ddevault 5y ago
        They broke the social contract. They can make this argument to a judge but they can't make it to the users they betrayed.
        • IshKebab 5y ago
          Yeah you might be right about that. But that still doesn't make it anything close to a "hostile takeover".