Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

scoringnotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 205 posts

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#51

Post by ratww »

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 link you posted:

> Otherwise, I will have to transfer information about you to lawyers who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content.

This is by far the worst takedown request I've ever seen in Github. The physically find you is especially concerning, since the owner of the repository seems to be a Chinese national.

Apparently by the time the takedown was written, the API was public but the documentation was taken down. The next replies don't make it better, and it seems they don't have a leg to stand on to send a proper DMCA.

I also had no idea they belonged to Ultimate Guitar. Honestly I lost some of the respect I had for MuseScore and Audacity teams after seeing this.

This is IMO worse than the youtube-dl debacle.

EDIT: The same developer who wrote the email seems to be making threats involving the police in another repository: https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/42#iss...

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#52

Post by matkoniecz »

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?

For start, nearly every software would benefit from running small scale UX test.

Take three people who never used given software, ask them to do the most basic tasks. And fix the most common problems.

Your software is much harder to use than you expect.

You do not need UI/UX people, massive scale testing to fix low hanging fruit.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#53

Post by calt »

jarcane wrote: post #11
schmorptron wrote: post #5

Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMWNvwLiXIQ

Does someone have any actual text explaining this without the marketing preamble and cute Youtube speak?

Once you get past the cute intro it’s a really great history of audacity, interview with some of the creators, and an overview of the ui challenges the new head of ui/ux has to face (keep it simple, but make it powerful, etc.)

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#54

Post by open0 »

shawnz wrote: post #24
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.

I would say the GIMP team does understand that and they often put a high focus on UI improvements on their roadmaps. I suppose they just have limited resources to work with.

I find the UI of recent versions of GIMP to be very nice for the simple image editing / processing that I do.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#55

Post by tyingq »

jchw wrote: post #13
ectopod wrote: post #2

Does anyone know what this means? The code is GPL v2. It has 126 contributors on github. The project doesn't seem to use copyright assignment. What has been acquired?

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.

Not saying they are doing this, but the copyright owner can fork the GPL work and create a closed source version if they want to. The GPL doesn't restrict the copyright owner in any way.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#56

Post by Denvercoder9 »

tyingq wrote: post #55
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.

Not saying they are doing this, but the copyright owner can fork the GPL work and create a closed source version if they want to. The GPL doesn't restrict the copyright owner in any way.

But as GP mentioned, the project has 126 contributors on GitHub who each own part of the copyright. So Muse Group doesn't own the full copyright of Audacity now.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#58

Post by ratww »

markn951 wrote: post #39
dTal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Religious zealotry is not realistic nor is it useful.

One of the takedown emails to a Github repository owner says "who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content".

I think any reasonable person would find this unethical mafia-like behaviour.

Re: Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

#59

Post by smolder »

markn951 wrote: post #39
dTal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Religious zealotry is not realistic nor is it useful.

This seems misdirected to me. Not all principled stances can be fairly compared to religious zealotry. Standing up for the rights of users strikes me as pretty useful.
Post reply on HN