this post was submitted on 26 May 2021
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Wow...
Q. Will Audacity remain open source?
A. Yes. Audacity was, is, and always will be 100% open source and free in every sense.
The CLA also allows us to use the code in other products that may not be open source, which we intend to do at some point to support the continued development of Audacity. We can already do this with the code we write ourselves, but the CLA allows us to do it with our contributors' code too. This is necessary because community code and internal code often get mixed in ways that are difficult to separate later on.
So, it'll remain open source, but any code you contribute out of the goodness of your heart, we can take and do with it as we may... wtf...
Yep, don't contribute to a corporate open-source project with a CLA, unless you're into doing free labour for other people's financial gain.
To be fair, this is kind of true of many open source licenses. GPL is the only one I can think of that disallows this...
And yet this is a GPL licensed product that they're working around that.
What if community contributions were released as a series of patches not integrated directly?
A package maintainer could download audacity source, then the community patches and make a release with them for your distribution.
Yeah, it's a sneaky way to turn it into proprietary software. On the question "How do you respond to those who believe that a CLA is against the spirit of the GPL?" they don't answer, they just hedge around the topic. I don't like what I read in that FAQ.