I'm not in any position to judge them for wanting to make more money but it sure feels like a way to kill off your userbase.
[1] https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/ultimate-guitar-acquires-m...
The situation is this: Musescore.com was about to get shut down because of massive copyright infringement. The future of MS Editor would be unclear under those circumstances. After the acquisition, we’ve made deals with all major music publishers plus thousands of independent publishers to license its offering. The downside of the process is that we had to takedown about 1% of the catalog (however the current offering grew x2 since then).
Upside is this: 1. Catalog is still free for everyone 2. Downloads are restricted just for copyrighted songs, because 3. Copyright owners get paid for their content since then 4. Original and public domain songs have no download restriction 5. Since acquisition the team behind MuseScore grew x7 times, as well as open source contributor community grew x2. 6. We are at 3.6 version now, which is the last stable version before 4.x, which is coming this year 7. 4.x will likely feature major workflow improvements, playback improvements, VST support etc.
I’m happy to answer all your questions.
The articles I read on this at the time were putting it in quite a negative light, that must have had an impact on my judgement - either way, I'm happy that you're successful with this model and that you can make scoring music more accessible with your open source software. (I've used musescore from middle school through university, so it's definitely had an impact on me!)
Apologies for making unsubstantiated comments and thanks for clarifying.
>> "We are also building up the MuseScore development team to help the developer community improve MuseScore’s desktop and mobile products quicker. The improvements we work on will continue to be based on the community’s feedback. For example, among other things, there have been numerous requests to improve the functionality of the mobile apps and the quality of the soundfont’s audio. As a result, we have already established a dedicated mobile development team and hired a soundfont specialist to focus on improving these areas. And in case you’re wondering, yes, of course the notation editor will continue to be open source and free."
And this appears to grant the company rights to any code people contribute in case they decide to close the source going forward: https://musescore.org/en/cla
So I'm not sure there's much of a distinction at this point.