Music Software and Problems of the Free Software Movement

(Written on 5 July 2021)

The music software MuseScore and Audacity are owned by Ultimate Guitar, a Russian corporation. The software is under GPL, but no-one trusts the Russians to respect privacy or any other human rights and of course UG can change the license at any time.

The ownership of free software is a major blemish in Stallman's “use copyright to protect the freedom of the software” approach – there is always still an owner. The character of the owner is important, as is their disposition of the work, should the owner die or transfer the rights.

The character of rightsholders has to be a part of our measures of freedom and openness in software development.

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PS: (29 November 2021) Since that time, the new owners of MuseScore and Audacity have set up shell companies in Cyprus which nominally own the software and implemented a number of unsavory practices. In response, a number of developers are participating in a fork of the original Audacity software, called Tenacity. (Alas, there is no similar project for MuseScore.) In theory, the new “owners” of Audacity could sue. Practically, I doubt that they will. I have come to believe that this series of events underscores the need for a more solid legal basis for cooperatively developed software.

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