Hi, I love Audacity, I follow tantacrul’s channel, believe he has great ideas and I think muse group can improve it greatly.
First: I’m not a lawyer, an investor, market specialist or audio professional in any way. Just a software developer and a user.
I’m a bit worried about a potential conflict of interest: Muse is a for-profit company, and while maintaining a free/open-source application with an open plugin and asset marketplace, it can also justify enforcing its own curated marketplace (MuseHub) for legitimate reasons like security, but in doing so, it ends up controlling that marketplace. That control creates an inherent conflict of interest that a for-profit company can’t fully escape, no matter how good its intentions are.
Blender’s model avoids this: as a non-profit, it can run its own controlled marketplace (which it already does) while keeping it free of conflicts of interest, and free of ads, both on the website and in the app.
There’s also a related concern: Audacity could become a vector for an ecosystem of a SaaS/freemium model software suite controlled by Muse Group, similar to Adobe’s. If that happens, a fork that offers a similar marketplace as an alternative (without ads and without turning into a SaaS/freemium product) could end up being more popular than Muse’s own version. In that case, all the work Muse put into building out the ecosystem might have to be redone by someone else, which brings us back to the fragmentation problem I mentioned above.
I’m not against creating a commercial for-profit product based on Audacity as a platform, it might very well work and be great, but I think the way to achieve a success with the commercial product should be different.
Thanks, and best wishes for the project.