Unfortunately, the incident with a Muse Group director openly blackmailing an open source developer [1] [2], threatening to have him deported to China while specifically calling out his public criticism of the CCP with a disgusting "who knows how he may be received"—well, to say that this incident leaves a bitter mark in my memory would be an understatement. I am happy to be using other free software for my engraving and playback needs, and with Tenacity just recently having published its first stable release, I'm eager to drop Audacity, too.
Truth be told, I was never a heavy MuseScore user, but I have used Audacity regularly for decades. This turn saddens me, but it matters to me how those I support use their power, and threatening someone's life over an audio program is bullying more severe than that which I can condone.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881539
[2]: https://github.com/Xmader/musescore-downloader/issues/5#issu...
I presume that nothing has come of this for those involved (or GPL'ing the mobile app?), but didn't finish the thread or otherwise dig further.
I think you're overstating it a bit.
How about you tell the whole story?
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, he deserved it.
Musescore is now hard to install, distributions don't carry builds of it. It's now only distributed as snap, flatpak and appimage. It now integrates with commercial services, etc.
That's just a characterization of what it looks like from the linux front, the application is sliding over to behave like a commercial project.
Tantacrul is a black mark on the FOSS community. Strong words, yes.
He's a composer and UX designer with a prior job in Microsoft, the fact that the tools he gets to work now are open source seems happenstance more than a deliberate choice. He was critical of existing music notation software and now works on one. He probably enjoys that the open nature of Muse Group lets him be pretty transparent about what he gets done and that's about it.
He mentioned that YouTube and Patreon do not provide him with good enough income, so if he quit Muse he'd just go work somewhere else where he can't talk about his work.
Also, they didn't really screw over the user base of Musescore. Musescore still works great and they are providing an amazing product for free. Even though pure open source might not be their focus, I have a hard time condemning them for providing great, free products.
(I'm not affiliated with Musescore or their company. I'm just a happy user of both Audacity and Musescore, both of which are the only truly competitive free products in their respective domains.)
I was hoping they just rushed out a buggy release, but there’s been no improvement since then. When folks complain about it on the subreddit or forums, Muse Group just brushes them off.
I’ve used Musescore for a long time, and I happily would’ve put up with moderate bugs for a contemporary UX. But unfortunately, 4.0/4.1 is completely broken for me.
Now if we only had a Musescore-quality Photoshop or After Effects alternative...
