Ah yes, after giving the middle finger to the entire open source community after you bought Audacity - only after screwing over the original userbase of MuseScore.
Tantacrul is a black mark on the FOSS community. Strong words, yes.
Tantacrul is a black mark on the FOSS community. Strong words, yes.
He's a composer and UX designer with a prior job in Microsoft, the fact that the tools he gets to work now are open source seems happenstance more than a deliberate choice. He was critical of existing music notation software and now works on one. He probably enjoys that the open nature of Muse Group lets him be pretty transparent about what he gets done and that's about it.
He mentioned that YouTube and Patreon do not provide him with good enough income, so if he quit Muse he'd just go work somewhere else where he can't talk about his work.
Wouldn't they be the black mark of the FOSS community for accepting money from a known bad entity? I also think this is discounting a big problem in the FOSS community, volunteers giving years of their free time on passion projects while dealing with angry users and not getting one cent out of it.
I routinely see people bitching about OBS and its devs for not being utterly perfect for their setup because they forget that once upon a time XSplit used to be the only good option. How much have they paid for OBS? zero. If company X comes and says "hey I can actually give you a living wage to work on your passion project" I think it's in some case reasonable to see their loyalty to whiny end users to be quite fragile.
The audacity devs all left. What was left were a few unknown, unvetted developers from a state known to employ extensive surveillance against users, quietly putting Google Analytics into FOSS software without asking the community.
Tantacrul was present, active, and patronizing throughout the entire ordeal.
Also, they didn't really screw over the user base of Musescore. Musescore still works great and they are providing an amazing product for free. Even though pure open source might not be their focus, I have a hard time condemning them for providing great, free products.
(I'm not affiliated with Musescore or their company. I'm just a happy user of both Audacity and Musescore, both of which are the only truly competitive free products in their respective domains.)