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Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid
(www.neowin.net)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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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.
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 and some soft forks appeared. I vaguely also remember hearing that there's some contract that the company owns the source code, so relicensing to a proprietary licence is easy and possible in future. All the new software the company 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.
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: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835
I remember feeling a bit bad for the maintainers. There's a lot of complaining for a minor and optional change, but at the same time it's interesting that they added telemetry anyway. (Not unmodified however)