this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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With how many companies started trying to move libre software to non libre licenses, it's also not a given that that helps.
I guess at least you can just fork libre software if that happens.
That's exactly the point and it's happened many times now. OpenOffice got converted to a non-libre license so it was forked to LibreOffice and OpenOffice was left to rot. Audacity fucked around and now there's like 3 or 4 forks all competing there. That's the great thing about open source software, if companies or even individual maintainers do something that pisses off the user base enough, someone will come along and fork it. It's truly democratic as people vote with their feet, or downloads as the case may be.
In addition, the work is never fully lost.
If unity goes to shit, welp, cannot use any of unity's code at all. Years and years of engine development wasted.
If some FOSS software goes to shit? That code is still there. Just take it and unshittify it. Little to no work wasted.
How are the Audacity forks doing?
I don't know honestly, I was never really an Audacity user in the first place. My limited googling though suggests there still isn't a strong consensus behind any of them yet though. It just sort of seems like you pick whichever one you like the name of the most.
I am a light user so I just stayed on version 3.0.2
It works for my use case as it is and the day it doesn't, I'll look for whatever fork is most popular
Being licensed as free software (libre) just means users have the freedom to fork and continue without the copyright owner (to the degree permitted by the license).
The same bad incentives still exist but they are mitigated when devs know competition can sprout out of their bad actions.