Preloading Audacity on student devices

Hello Audacity Team!

First, and most important, congratulations for your amazing app!

I work on a Hardware company, and our core is to develop and sell laptop devices for k-12 students.

Often, we receive requests from the teachers/students regarding the available software on the devices. Since it’s their first time using a computer (specially in non-developed countries), they request if we can preload some software on the devices to be ready to use.

That’s how we came across Audacity. Since the software is free and its under the GPL license, if we provide the source code and if we don’t change anything on the source, can we preload the software on the device? Its not our intention to charge anything for the software.

Our biggest doubt is, if we can install it, can we use the Audacity logo to create the user manuals, device box, and other materials? We don’t want to take any credit of Audacity and its our intention to be clear and transparent regarding the available software on the device. The usage of the logo will be only to promote the Audacity software.

Can we preload the software and use the logos?


Thanks for your support.

Best Regards,

Thanks for asking.
In short, yes you can give Audacity to your clients for free, and provided that you give a totally original / unmodified version of Audacity it is sufficient to just direct your clients here for the source code: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases

For detailed license terms and conditions, see this section of the Audacity website: https://www.audacityteam.org/about/
In particular, these parts:
https://www.audacityteam.org/about/license/
https://www.audacityteam.org/about/citations-screenshots-and-permissions/

Thanks for your great support.

In this case we just want to bundle the software on our devices. All the mentions to Audacity will be to promote the software.
As I could understand, if I follow those line there is no issue by using the logos as well.

Thanks.

Best Regards,

Yes it’s all pretty straightforward really. Give credit where it’s due, and don’t make false claims about endorsements :wink:
Giving your clients a link to the official Audacity website (https://www.audacityteam.org/) is a good idea so that they know what they are getting and can find help / updates when needed.

Perfect!

Soon as I have everything running I will share it with you.

Thanks for your support.

Best Regards,

One thing that might be worth mentioning, given that you mentioned an educational setting - Audacity is designed to work entirely on a local machine. Trying to get it to work over a network is very likely to cause a lot of headaches. If network storage is used, projects should be moved or copied to the local machine before opening in Audacity. When saving projects, save to the local machine, not directly to network storage.