Comment on Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid
yistdaj@pawb.social 11 hours agoWhat stops those open source projects having that same rugpull? AOSP was open source and for a long time could be installed on one’s phone indefinitely.
You could argue ownership, but if Audacity can be bought then so can nearly anything.
notfromhere@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
I’m out of the loop, what’s that about Audacity? Looks like they still have a github repo with very recent activity and Wikipedia says their trademark was acquired by a company in 2021.
yistdaj@pawb.social 7 hours ago
As far as I remember, Audacity’s maintainers, previously just some volunteers with no organisation, decided to sell the ownership of the project to a company with some guitar platform. Nothing changed at first, they employed the maintainers to work on the same project they were already working on.
Then they started adding controversial telemetry (outcry convinced them to switch to opt in, I believe) and some soft forks appeared. I vaguely also remember hearing that there’s some contract that the company owns the source code, so relicencing to a proprietary licence is easy and possible in future. All the new software the companty launches is proprietary, and there’s signs they want to tie it all together into a single suite.
Nothing majorly bad has happened to Audacity, yet. But decisions are no longer community driven, as shown by the telemetry drama. I fear it’s a matter of time.
yistdaj@pawb.social 7 hours ago
I should probably add: if it becomes proprietary, the remaining soft fork will likely die. Turns out very few people have the technical knowledge for Audacity.
If you want to read the telemetry controversy/drama, I found this one I’d read years ago: github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835 I remember feeling a bit bad for the maintainers.