Audacity Aquired by Muse Group

I know Blender has a lot of corporate sponsorship, so I think the explanation is there’s a “commoditize your complements” effect going on. But does anyone have a more specific hypothesis? E.g., why does Blender have so many complements and the GIMP so few?

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

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.

Not in every case. For experienced/professional/power users of any software, what matters is maximizing the information density in time of both input and output. Sometimes the best way to do that appears arcane.

I want to be able to accomplish much in as little time as possible, so I want a high temporal input information density. So that might mean using a mouse instead of a trackpad for precise aiming and scrolling, or using keyboard shortcuts instead of on-screen icons. It might mean there are different mouse behaviors for ctrl-drag, middle-click-drag, etc.

I also want to be able to receive as much information about the state of the application as possible in as little time as possible. Too little density and I have to keep more state in my head and spend time jumping around. Too much density and the senses are overwhelmed. This might mean, for a CLI tool, that zero output is the best output in case of success. But for long-running processes that might be a progress bar under a list of log entries. For GUIs, the optimum might mean that there is a lot of information and a lot of actions on screen with reduced whitespace, which seems intimidating at first but is necessary to communicate the state of the system to the user.

So convincing any power user to "let go" is like asking someone to give up their legs for a scooter. Sure, it's simpler to go places in mostly straight lines with a scooter, but linear motion is only one of the many things people do with their legs that justify the arcane UI of unstable bipedal locomotion. We walk along streets, run along trails, jump over obstacles, dance, spar, climb, swim, etc.

This is not to say that scooters have no place, or that every tool is at a global optimum. But any "different method" that someone wants to propose will very deservedly receive pushback if it does not fulfill the full purpose of the old method.

Not sure about this case, but iirc you can have contributors to a project without them owing "part of the copyright" for the stuff they wrote. You just have to make them assign the copyright to you if they want to include their code in the project (they can always fork if they don't like that, but the original authors still get the copyright to the core project).

Also, and orthogonal, a lot of time there are 1-2-5-10 core devs, and the rest 100s are just some small changes here and there, fixes to the documentation, some plugin contribution, etc. In other words, easily writen out, if it comes to that.

He's reporting them to the police of a country for a copyright complaint. The fact that the country is China doesn't mean anything ominous.

Besides the "state persecution" thing, there's regular police and court work in China, every day, for 1.6 billion people, and millions of criminal, civic, business disputes, and other such cases, which is where this will fall into.

That it's China probably makes it even lighter, not harder, since copyright abuses there are seen much more lightly than in the west.

Essentially it boils down to this: if you see value to society in allowing people to share musical scores with each other, that's fundamentally at odds with a libre software philosophy. Because if you let people share music on a platform, they will inevitably share copyrighted melodies, which means not only that you are forced to monetize to be able to strike licensing arrangements, or else be sued into oblivion. And you are also required to enforce that the sharing software be used as intended in order to placate rightsholders, or else be sued into oblivion. And it's that "as intended" that is fundamentally different from how many of us think about FOSS.

There's a lot of corporate speak in the official post here related to the emplacement of score downloads behind the paywall in the first place https://musescore.com/groups/improving-musescore-com/discuss... but it's the same sentiment: if MuseScore.com doesn't put in place paywalls for downloads and enforce them, they will lose their ability to negotiate with major music publishers, and they see that outcome being a net loss to society of access to digital scores.

Frankly, I think this is a reasonable tradeoff. MuseScore sees monetization and adherence to these restrictions as a necessary step to ensure they have the resources and community to promote music literacy. That's a distinct mission from, say, GNU's mission, and just as valid. And of all the corporations using GPL for visions distinct from GNU's vision (here's looking at you, AWS), this one at least has a reason beyond being a naked cash grab.

The affected parties have first to prove or at least argue that the software is doing anything illegal. The repository owners were using a documented, public, authenticated, third party API that was only taken down after the issue was posted. This is not illegal.

If there were anything illegal like piracy happening, it should have been resolved is by having the affected parties send a DMCA to GitHub, just like in the YouTube-dl situation, just like the repo owner asked Daniel J. Rey to do.

This is how it's done. Not by sending lies ("illegally using our private API" that was actually publicly documented) and making mafia-like threats ("will physically find you").

OTOH, they are probably not spending too much money as a result. While acquiring better visibility and (hopefully) more goodwill from the audio enthusiast community.