Out of curiosity and also because I could use a simple and powerful audio editor sometimes, I picked up the source code of the fork by and attempted to compile it to a WinXP target using Visual Studio 2017 with a v141_xp platform toolset on my Windows 7 build VM. The forks all spawn from 3.0.4, which I guess was the last version before the Muse takeover. Now, aside from all that I found that Audacity has dropped Windows XP support somewhere after version 2, now standing at version 3.0.5. And while the privacy policy seems to have been by now, the dual-licensing issue.

Of course, this is scaring off a lot of people who actually prefer free software for exactly what it is. In essence, a build from the free and open-source code might no longer be the same program as the one officially released by the developers. In theory, they could integrate proprietary improvements or questionable code into their official binary releases without the source code for them ever being published. Dual-licensing it as the copyright holder (this is perfectly legal by the way) under an additional, unspecified license may open quite the can of worms.

Another part was the idea to dual-license the project, which currently stands under the GNU General Public License version 2. I haven’t studied the issues in detail, but most of the outrage seems to center around a new privacy policy which included all kinds of telemetry data collection plus some Google Analytics integration. A short while ago there’s been quite a fuzz about the free and open source audio editor going all spyware on users, quickly spawning a set of forks to run away to after the acquired the project.

Audacity 32 bit windows xp