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Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

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Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#31

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

VadimPR wrote: post #26
throw_m239339 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. True, Blender really exploded when they re-designed the interface. I hope someday GIMP team understand that. The software is solid, but the interface isn't great. Some very simple workflow changes made Blender easier to use.

Where do you get UI/UX people in from?

Learn. That's what I did.

The issue is that many designers and engineers loathe Usability and Accessibility people (like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman).

For me, it all started with Don Norman's excellent book The Design of Everyday Things[0] (nee The Psychology of Everyday Things).

Reading that book changed the way that I view the world. I can't walk through a door, anymore, without evaluating its affordances and usability.

The challenge (for me) is melding usability and aesthetics. In my experience, designing and implementing a truly usable software interface is hard. It's also highly iterative. A lot of "running things up the flagpole" stuff. I throw out a lot of code, and slaughter a lot of sacred cows.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#32

Post by meibo »

marcan_42 wrote: post #29
spamalot159 wrote: post #6

My first reaction was "oh no..". Audacity has to be one of the most beloved and widely recommended software of all time. It's not often that an aquisition like this goes well for very long. After looking at MuseScore and UltimateGuitar, however, it looks like they are also free and have a similar aesthetic to Audacity. Maybe this will work out after all.

What scares me is musescore.com. That website went from being a largely free repository of sheet music to a subscription service paying into the music industry, with no support for CC style licenses (it's either public domain or paywalled), locking everyone's sheet music retroactively behind a paywall regardless of actual license, sometimes in violation of said licenses (e.g. anything with a BY-NC or similar style li…

I was mentioning this last time MuseScore appeared on HN - their CEO gave some insight in the comments on how this came to be.

Seems to boil down to "music publishing mafia didn't like it", which is understandable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25825533

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#33

Post by simondotau »

marcan_42 wrote: post #29
spamalot159 wrote: post #6

My first reaction was "oh no..". Audacity has to be one of the most beloved and widely recommended software of all time. It's not often that an aquisition like this goes well for very long. After looking at MuseScore and UltimateGuitar, however, it looks like they are also free and have a similar aesthetic to Audacity. Maybe this will work out after all.

What scares me is musescore.com. That website went from being a largely free repository of sheet music to a subscription service paying into the music industry, with no support for CC style licenses (it's either public domain or paywalled), locking everyone's sheet music retroactively behind a paywall regardless of actual license, sometimes in violation of said licenses (e.g. anything with a BY-NC or similar style li…

On the other hand, isn't it nice to have a funding model that allows developers of open source software to be sustainably salaried?

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#34

Post by dTal »

simondotau wrote: post #33
marcan_42 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What scares me is musescore.com. That website went from being a largely free repository of sheet music to a subscription service paying into the music industry, with no support for CC style licenses (it's either public domain or paywalled), locking everyone's sheet music retroactively behind a paywall regardless of actual license, sometimes in violation of said licenses (e.g. anything with a BY-NC or similar style li…

On the other hand, isn't it nice to have a funding model that allows developers of open source software to be sustainably salaried?

Not at the expense of what it stands for, no.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#35

Post by mxcrossb »

wexq wrote: post #9
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #4

Tantacrul who has been working with Muse Score for a while now to improve their UX will also be working on Audacity. They also plan to hire some full time devs. Source: https://youtu.be/RMWNvwLiXIQ Well worth watching his other videos too, even if you don’t use musical notation software. Funny and insightful commentary on software usability in general.

OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. His twitter ( https://twitter.com/Tantacrul ) and youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/user/martinthekearykid ) are full of interesting tidbits, an you can tell he's passionate about things. Even if you don't do music/notation his video on Sibelius, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI , is ridiculously funny, but also on point.

IMO the problem is that OSS developers hate any change that’s made to a UI because it breaks their workflow. As a result, a lot of OSS has old style interfaces, and it’s hard for UI designers to convince the others to make changes.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#36

Post by Conan_Kudo »

Ecco wrote: post #16
jchw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MuseScore is also GPL, so I assume there is no intent to attempt to change the license. This probably is more about the organization, funding, direction, etc.

Yes, but concretely, what did they buy? And from whom?

They likely now own the copyrights held by the primary developers and all the trademark rights to the Audacity name and logo.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#37

Post by bayindirh »

mxcrossb wrote: post #35
wexq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. His twitter ( https://twitter.com/Tantacrul ) and youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/user/martinthekearykid ) are full of interesting tidbits, an you can tell he's passionate about things. Even if you don't do music/notation his video on Sibelius, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI , is ridiculously funny, but also on point.

IMO the problem is that OSS developers hate any change that’s made to a UI because it breaks their workflow. As a result, a lot of OSS has old style interfaces, and it’s hard for UI designers to convince the others to make changes.

I do not hate when an application I use revamp its UI (e.g. Pixelmator -> Pixelmator Pro). However, developing good UX is as hard as developing robust code and high performance algorithms.

Unless the devs get UX improvement backwards (cough GNOME cough), there's nothing to worry IMHO. OTOH, for a CLI application, backwards compatibility and/or graceful depreciation is key.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#38

Post by Conan_Kudo »

globular-toast wrote: post #22
rubin55 wrote: post #3

How does one aquire FOSS software?

You can buy the copyright from the copyright holder(s). That seems quite straightforward if the holder is a single entity, like with Qt, for example. If it's multiple entities, as with Audacity, then in theory it's no different, but practically speaking I'm not sure how they have done this.

They probably hired the main developers and have the copyrights for their work transferred to them. In practice, it has no meaningful impact since relicensing is (nearly) impossible due to the distributed copyright among all contributors of Audacity (which is a good thing!).

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#39

Post by markn951 »

dTal wrote: post #34
simondotau wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, isn't it nice to have a funding model that allows developers of open source software to be sustainably salaried?

Not at the expense of what it stands for, no.

Religious zealotry is not realistic nor is it useful.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#40

Post by Hinrik »

marcan_42 wrote: post #29
spamalot159 wrote: post #6

My first reaction was "oh no..". Audacity has to be one of the most beloved and widely recommended software of all time. It's not often that an aquisition like this goes well for very long. After looking at MuseScore and UltimateGuitar, however, it looks like they are also free and have a similar aesthetic to Audacity. Maybe this will work out after all.

What scares me is musescore.com. That website went from being a largely free repository of sheet music to a subscription service paying into the music industry, with no support for CC style licenses (it's either public domain or paywalled), locking everyone's sheet music retroactively behind a paywall regardless of actual license, sometimes in violation of said licenses (e.g. anything with a BY-NC or similar style li…

I found it amusing that the originator of the takedown email commented with this:

>We are genuinely committed to open source and do want to make as much as possible as free as possible. The fact that I am sitting here and writing in these discussions at all should be evidence of our commitment to open source and engagement vs. simply passing the issue on to lawyers to deal with.

And then this next (and final) comment ended with this:

> I will not be commenting further on this topic.

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