https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_Group

We'll need to spend time making sure it's applying correctly to every corner of the app - but when it's done, the app will be far more broadly supported than V3.

https://github.com/audacity/audacity

The application privacy policy is here

https://www.audacityteam.org/desktop-privacy-notice/

However Reddit is sometimes a source of sensational misunderstanding, fear, uncertainty, doubt and misinformation.

Audacity does not store any personal information of any kind, and never did.

They also made the fine video.

And use the fine software.

Even if there is no tracking at the moment, there is always the worry that Muse Group will "go bad" and start adding tracking, or make the later versions closed-source, etc. One could argue that it's still better than a fully closed source company - sure - but what happens to Audacity/MuseScore then?

Reliance on a single company developing code has huge benefits: as discussed in this video, the centralisation really helped with vision and planning; but it does make me slightly uncomfortable. The development is no longer "open", in the sense of community driven. The application now has a different goal (to make money for Muse Group), not necessarily aligned with what users want/need. It cuts to the core of what we actually want from free software - lack of profit motive? transparency? Of what exactly?

Mostly people want free as in beer and actual users of Audacity use Audacity because they want to process audio.

it does make me slightly uncomfortable

Then you have a choice to make. There are many other audio software packages with a variety of tradeoffs to choose from because everything is not for everyone.

make money for Muse Group

To me the strategy appears to be that strengthening the two open source projects (MuseScore and Audacity) enhances their many commercial offerings…for example a stronger MuseScore is better for Hal Leonard Publishing particularly in light of the demise of Finale and a better Audacity code base is a good way to develop the audio code that other Muse Group products need anyway.

And for what my pure speculation is worth, the purchase of the trademarks for Audacity and MuseScore could rationally contain conditions underwhich Muse Group would have to sell those trademarks back to the original owners.

But even absent such conditions of sale, the original trademark owners likely trusted Muse Group to do the right thing (and if the sale was just about money, then the original trademark owners were already mercenary themselves and so whatever trust you previously had was already misplaced).

While the codebase is open source, the website could provide binaries that were not built from the open source code (e.g by patching to add tracking).

That is a violation of GPL.

That's a claim we'll never truly know. Also, one auto-update will ruin your day.

In the case of Muse Score it also provides a marketplace for third parties.

I don’t use it but I can see why it exists…ordinary folks expect cloud services these days. And if I had a different use case, it would help me get stuff done.

But for what it’s worth with Audacity I don’t see it pop up as a location on my computer.

A lot of projects propose cloud storage without trying to force it on you. More the How than the What which is questionable here.

Add in all the people who just don’t care and there is only a relative handful of people who are bothered.

Now filter out the people who don’t use the software from that relative handful and there’s an actual handful of users who might have to find something else because everything isn’t for everyone.

As someone who's never worked with either (only web UIs), I thought this would be a good chance to understand: why is wx bad, what makes Qt good?

More, what is better for this specific project at this point in time given the objectives…it’s just an engineering judgement.

WXwidgits got Audacity through twenty odd years of intense development and helped millions of users.