Out of curiosity, what ever happened to all of the drama with MuseScore, locking downloads behind a subscription, the Audacity acquisition + telemetry debacle? It looks like Tenacity still exists in some form, though it does not appear like there is a ton of significant activity on it in the last month or so.
While I don't know about the OSS community's stance, I can say that most casual users have embraced the new version of MuseScore. They added a lot of important features with the latest version, and I think most people don't really care about the telemetry.
I think some of this might be avoidable by downloading Musescore separately from the larger package they've promoting now and not using some features? That's what I do, anyhow.
Note, this would not be the first open source music app to lock downloads behind paywall, e.g. Ardour is known for it: https://community.ardour.org/download
MuseScore desktop (the composition / notation app) has never been behind a paywall. This is a mixup with the mobile application which is a sheet music viewer that features copyrighted scores.
You can get it without charge from just about any and every Linux distribution.
You can get the source code without charge from ardour.org/download (or from our mirror repo on github).
You can get it (legally) without charge from anybody else who already has it.
The only thing you cannot do is to get a ready-to-run binary without charge from ardour.org itself. You can opt to pay as little as US$1 for that, however.
In my world, a paywall is something that stops you from getting access to something without paying for it.
The Ardour "paywall" does not do that.
You may not like the "cost" of the alternative (e.g. finding someone else who already has the Windows version, or learning to build it yourself, or getting someone else to build it for you), but those costs are, I would claim, not part of the "paywall".
If you had said "ardour.org doesn't offer ready-to-run binaries unless you pay something for them", I would not even have commented.
You're saying "oh, well, they don't provide no-charge downloads, so it's paywalled" is a comment that to me basically ignores what makes libre software libre software.
If looks like you're not considering a resource to be behind a paywall if there's a way to get it via other means, without paying.
I'd say the opposite is true, you can put content behind a paywall in one place, even if it is freely (libre and/or gratis) available elsewhere. Wikipedia has a page called "List of public domain resources behind a paywall" [1], this seems a nice example. To me Ardour binaries are another.
You are walking down a road in a small town. On the left, one of the residents, is selling freshly cut sunflowers for $2.99 a bunch. You ask them if you can have a bunch for free, and they say no. You keep walking. A few blocks up ahead, you come across another resident who has put a bucket of cut sunflowers in front of the their yard, free for the taking.
Are the sunflowers "behind a paywall" in any functional sense? Does the fact that one possible place to get them requires payment mean anything when they are available at no cost elsewhere?
In my view the sunflowers are behind a paywall at that particular place on the left.
The functional sense seems very relative. For people who cannot go further, all sunflowers are behind a paywall. For people who can, it’s just that, i.e. they also have access to sunflowers not behind a paywall.
To be clear, I’d say the resident on the left (or Ardour for that matter) is in no way worse because they’re offering paid sunflowers. They have every right to do so. And something must be good about their offer if people are buying from them (location, authority, desire to support their business, perhaps all of the above).
You get a 70 MB "Ardour*.run" file that is a bash script that contains setup instructions followed by raw binary code. And you good the feeling of knowing that you've supporting a great open source project.
Also note that only a few linux distros are bleeding-edge (such as Arch-Linux, which will contain binaries for newly released package versions pretty quickly). But if you are on a non-bleeding edge linux distro, your distro's repos aren't kept up-to-date and so the advantage of the Ardour binary download is you get an up-to-date package without having to install a 3rd-party repo or build it yourself.
Yep, our packages install in parallel with each other (and with repo versions too), so you can keep older versions around.
And we aim to release every 2 months.
People who pay monthly also get access to nightly builds, allowing them to test things out before release (useful for us, sometimes useful for them). Most of our alpha/beta testers, however, build it themselves, from source.
I believe it was the sheet music that was paywalled, not the software. That was a bit concerning since as far as I know a large portion of it was UGC and some of it even public domain, so it was weird to ask for a subscription payment for it. At this point though, it does look like they have made some amends, though I'm not sure if everyone's satisfied. Doesn't seem to matter too much in the grand scheme of things, overall, though it was an unfortunate situation to watch unfold even as an outsider.
Note: Linux distros still provide free downloads for Ardour, and Ardour's source code is free for anyone to build. Ardour's official binary builds are what is behind a paywall.
Also the "locking downloads behind a paywall" only applies to scores that users have uploaded to musical score social media sharing site musescore.com, but the desktop program MuseScore binaries are available for free on Win, Mac, Linux, BSDs via https://musescore.org/en/download. You can anyway post your scores anywhere for free. And there may be proprietary VSTs that you can pay to download via MuseHub, but MuseScore's baseline audio synthesis (as well as any free soundfonts you can freely download) are free.
Have things cooled down now?