Tantacrul who has been working with Muse Score for a while now to improve their UX will also be working on Audacity. They also plan to hire some full time devs.
Well worth watching his other videos too, even if you don’t use musical notation software. Funny and insightful commentary on software usability in general.
> OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this.
True, Blender really exploded when they re-designed the interface. I hope someday GIMP team understand that. The software is solid, but the interface isn't great. Some very simple workflow changes made Blender easier to use.
I would say the GIMP team does understand that and they often put a high focus on UI improvements on their roadmaps. I suppose they just have limited resources to work with.
I really just wish GIMP (and Audacity now that I think about it) had a command palette, where I could type in the name of anything found in the menu or assigned to a keyboard shortcut. I don’t use both of them a lot so all of my time is spent search menus for what I am trying to do.
BTW, MacOS has this feature for menus in all apps: at the top of the ‘Help’ menu is a search field. Also invoked with cmd-? (i.e. cmd-shift-/ on my keyboard). The highlighted menu item is then triggered with ‘enter’—so for touch-typists this is way faster than using the mouse.
Anyone care to chime in about why Blender seems to have the resources for this kind of work but the GIMP doesn’t?
I know Blender has a lot of corporate sponsorship, so I think the explanation is there’s a “commoditize your complements” effect going on. But does anyone have a more specific hypothesis? E.g., why does Blender have so many complements and the GIMP so few?
I’m not hugely involved in this space so this is just speculation, but my impression is that Blender is relied on by companies more than GIMP. It seems like Photoshop still dominates the space GIMP occupies. So there’s probably just a lot more money being funneled into Blender because a lot more profit depends on it.
I was under the impression that Blender at the big studio level was still pretty niche? (E.g., when a studio switches, it’s still a news story.) If you’re aware of places Blender is being used that generate a lot of profit, I’d love to hear about them.
I was under the impression it had more to do with symbiotic relationships between products. E.g., people using Unreal need modeling software (Epic is a sponsor), people using modeling software need GPUs (Nvidia is a sponsor).
My understanding is while Blender is not the market leader, it does have significant market share, and significant corporate funding. OTOH, commericial usage of GIMP is pretty much nothing.
Maybe because there are relatively fewer options for free modeling software, compared to the tons of free 2D graphics programs one can choose from? Putting money into Blender helps those companies getting rid of buggy, expensive 3D software. For 2D graphics, they already have plenty of options.
I was able to use Paint.Net in place of GIMP. Paint.Net is Windows-only but it handled pretty much all my raster image editing needs and unlike GIMP I can actually remember how to use it despite only using it every couple of months.
I didn't just mean free options. There are still many other acceptably-priced and acceptably-licensed graphics programs besides PhotoShop. These may still be more acceptable than buying into the PhotoShop ecosystem. With 3D software, it's not so simple.
One thing I don't understand is the move to monochrome icons. I'm really bloody good at recognizing shape+color combinations; the old icons were ugly, but I was able to find the tool I wanted in an instant. After the redesign of the icon pack, I always find myself slowly iterating through every icon in the toolbox to try to find the particular abstract monochrome shape I want.
I think a redesign of the icons was necessary, because the old ones don't look amazing. But you can make tasteful icons which are also colorful and recognizable.
(And I know you can switch icon themes, but when we're talking about UX, we're largely talking about the out-of-the-box experience. 99.9% of users are going to stick with the default icon pack.)
> (And I know you can switch icon themes, but when we're talking about UX, we're largely talking about the out-of-the-box experience. 99.9% of users are going to stick with the default icon pack.)
I agree the monochrome icons have significant disadvantages. Visual Studio a few years ago made the same attempt at having monochrome icons and there was such pushback that they eventually moved to the current scheme of "monochrome with a splash of colour", which I think is way better.
That said, Photoshop also uses monochrome icons and it can help in some ways to avoid distracting from the image which you are working on. I am not sure what the best compromise would be.
Franky the new icons are just not too good either. It's possible to have monochrome icons that are memorable and easily recognized—but GIMP's icons aren't that.
i think it would help if they were mostly a vertical list as well. the way they are now you are having to scan left to right but also moving downward as well. even 2 side by side like photoshop does is better since you can mostly just scan downwards
It’s odd that you singled out Gimp as they are the only free software project I’m aware of who engaged a professional UX consultant to redesign their UI, and that must be maybe 15 years ago
Gimp is great, but it’s also the UI that I think of when I think of OSS that lacks finish. Hiring a UX consultant one time, 15 years ago, isn’t how people realize a good user experience. That’s why companies employ UI / UX engineers full time…
> True, Blender really exploded when they re-designed the interface.
So this must be what happened... over and over I've heard about people switching to Blender now, even many professionals. I tried it many many years ago and found it, quite honestly, awful.
I guess I should download it again and see how things have changed.
The issue is that many designers and engineers loathe Usability and Accessibility people (like Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman).
For me, it all started with Don Norman's excellent book The Design of Everyday Things[0] (nee The Psychology of Everyday Things).
Reading that book changed the way that I view the world. I can't walk through a door, anymore, without evaluating its affordances and usability.
The challenge (for me) is melding usability and aesthetics. In my experience, designing and implementing a truly usable software interface is hard. It's also highly iterative. A lot of "running things up the flagpole" stuff. I throw out a lot of code, and slaughter a lot of sacred cows.
It's true that there often exists a clash between designers and those who champion accessibility standards. IMO, this is normally because the designer in question hasn't enough experience working on software. Speaking for myself? I designed the accessibility features in Paint 3D while at Microsoft. I was in charge of accessibility of another Microsoft Studio that worked on Hololens software.
For MuseScore 4 (currently in development), I have made sure that every bit of UI passes web accessibility contrast standards and I have designed a new 'High Contrast Mode' which is being implemented right now. In addition, myself and another member of the UKAAF (Peter Jonas) have designed a far better focus state / keyboard navigation system into MS4 than MS3 had. This will enable much better screen reader support and will also help with ongoing efforts to introduce Braille support too.
I'm not one of those designers. But I do sympathise with the concern. I see it all the time!
You mention in the video that the next steps will involve interviewing users and developers to find out more about the software usability and potential issues / fixes. Could you make this whole process and the results public, such that other OSS can benefit from this kind of usability analysis?
There are indeed many resources out there about this sort of process, but I think it would be great to see an expert long-form explaining how they take the interview results and convert them into actionable goals in order to improve the user experience.
I'd add to this the thought of supporting a dumping-ground approach where people can throw suggestions, rants, complaints etc "over the wall" into a giant wiki/knowledgebase or bug tracker type environment that accepts OC submissions or just links to external discussions or sources of insight.
Hmm. Now I'm wondering whether such a thing should be run for a finite period, or left open to track improvement over time. Perhaps the system could be cyclic, with "calls for feedback" that would require re-submission into each cycle. This would have the advantage of effectively auto-closing all unfinished work after feedback invitations, but the disadvantage of frustrating repeat submitters of issues that generally don't get prioritized. ...You know what, there are probably good established ways of doing this, Microsoft probably knows this stuff backwards, and the Blender foundation seem to have a good feedback thing going so they probably know a thing or two as well.
Regardless of how it's done, spreading the fact that it is being done far and wide is IMO crucial (eg, getting this onto as many OSS/tech news sites as possible) - and I also think that the _worse_ the signal/noise ratio, the better, as I reckon this would be a good indicator that the long tail of the interesting really-edge cases are effectively being captured!
I just started using MuseScore 3.6 and I've gotta say it is surprisingly usable for an open source project. There are some annoyances, like drag-and-drop scrolling the page instead of selecting notes, but overall it becomes intuitive quite quickly. So, if that is your work, then congratulations so far! Looking forward to version 4.
In fact, accessibility is probably the last remaining hope of power users[0].
With general-audience software, the market doesn't care much about the minority that are the serious users, and it's hard to make a convincing argument to business people here. However, accessibility does have a strong enough ethical argument behind it, which is also increasingly being backed by regulations.
Allowing accessibility tools to work with an application involves annotating UI with machine-readable metadata about information displayed and operations available. That makes the interface comprehensible to any external software - including software that could use this information to provide an alternative, more ergonomic frontend, undoing various user-hostile decisions of the original design.
--
[0] - By which I don't mean just computer nerds, but also everyone who uses some bit of software on a regular basis - particularly in context of work.
In web apps, you can short-circuit this “there’s no business case” nonsense a bit by building your components using the accessibility attributes as the hooks between HTML, JS & CSS. E.G. rather than adding classes for everything you want JS and CSS to act on, instead hook onto the attributes role, aria-*, hidden and so on. If you do it as habit, it takes only a little bit longer to think about or type than attaching a class name, but helps you use the browser’s built-in accessibility support “for free”. If you work this way, you don’t even need to tell management what you’re doing.
I accept that this is easier on smaller, or new projects.
100% agree. I've noticed this as well. A lot of the time, the best objective-sounding argument for something I want is "it's necessary for accessibility", even though _I_ want it for reasons which would've been ignored. And a whole lot of the settings I rely on to make my computing devices comfortable are hidden under "accessibility" menus in settings screens.
There are even cases where the strongest argument for something to have a web version in addition to an Android/iOS app is accessibility. You can make some really interesting and specialized input hardware for Windows PCs which has no chance of working on an iPad, so there are people whose disabilities makes web apps way easier to use than any Android/iOS app. And if there exists a web app, power users can use the service from their comfortable desktop setup rather than from the tiny screen on their phone.
Accessibility is the most effective argument against the "one-size-fits-all" "it works for 90% of users" thinking that's otherwise so pervasive.
Accessibility is often understood to be for people with disabilities. For example, Wikipedia's first line on the topic[1] is:
> Accessibility in the sense considered here refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities.
And the W3C's intro to accessibility[2] says:
> When websites and web tools are properly designed and coded, people with disabilities can use them.
I don't have any disabilities which affect my use of technology. But I do like a fast key repeat rate, I like hot dim my screen at night further than the normal brightness setting allows, and I like to enable mono audio when watching a video where one of the audio channels is broken. I don't think most people would characterize these use cases as "accessibility", but they're all hidden under the accessibility settings in various systems.
You may consider this accessibility though, I don't know. There are definitions out there which don't put emphasis on disability.
I think you're trying to counter my off-the-cuff (re)-definition of accessibility. You're pushing it into the sphere of "it's just for disabled people".
I agree that's how the word is used most often. But using it that way others disabled people. Othering allows decision-makers to ignore the out-group because "it's not economically viable to support them" or because "it's too difficult" or "we'll have to learn & refactor, which takes time away from features"... or whatever.
I consciously put forward the suggestion, somewhat masked by my flippant tone, that developers (in the sense of anyone involved in "making": CEOs, management, designers, engineers) could do a small shift in their thinking that would open up the idea of access for all. This would push back the othering of disabled people, would include them. It would allow developers to work more creatively with the idea that their fellow humans interact with with products and services in myriad ways.
Even if you want to take the tighter definition of accessibility put forward on Wikipedia, the topic can still be opened up to new perspectives. Consider the differences between the medical and social models of disability. The medical model says that disabled people have deviations from mean physiology or psychology that must be addressed symptomatically, under "medical" supervision. The social model[0] pushes the disability out to our social systems. Sure, some people have "incapacities" - challenges with movement or sensory processing etc - but the dis-able-ing is enacted by the social systems (design patterns, funding, font-sizing, stairs vs ramps, stigma, othering) that ignores the needs of anyone off the mean.
I struggle to see clearly at distance. The fact I don't know which train to board is more because the station designers built the timetabling system with a typeface that can only be read comfortably by those with mean/median vision. If they printed it larger, I could stand in the crowd and read the sign like everyone else. If they'd installed a PA system and announcements, I could use my hearing instead. (fortunately, most stations do work this way now. Hopefully you can see the systems thinking in my example).
One of the first things I do on a new Mac is to enable three finger drag. A couple of years ago this option moved fron trackpad settings to accessibility options.
yea when i was using windows a few years back i got some great mileage out of autohotkey + microsoft's accessibility access. (acc.ahk is the script someone make that interfaces with it if anyone is interested)
one good example was being able to control spotify. it doesn't work with the current redesign i don't think, but i used to be able to heart a song, show the current track name and artist in a tooltip, or list all the songs in your friends tab. lots of handy stuff like that and it all worked even when the spotify window was in the background
I would also recommend Emotional Design by the same author. It's a follow-up book that has been very useful for me to understand that great design isn't just usable and accessible, but should also be beautiful, and should respect that what people build using software are not just files on a storage system but often their most personally meaningful things.
For a long time nielsen groups webpage was one of the uglier websites on the web in the name of accessibility. That's part of where mistrust of them specifically comes from.
Also, like many pundits, there's a lot of "My way is THE ONE, TRUE WAY" stuff going on; which isn't a particularly good way to make friends.
They have the right idea (I have taken a number of NNG classes, over the years), but they are only one dimension, of a multi-dimensional space, and I have found it to my advantage to take a "hybrid" approach (which means that everyone is pissed at me).
I think it’s a culture change on the developer side. I was exposed to UI UX about fifteen years ago and worked with a number of terrific designers who put users first. The problem is as devs the job can feel overwhelming enough and then when you get to a point you feel is done, now you have someone telling you you need to redo it. It’s an egoless thing one has to develop and we don’t necessarily encourage that. I think the number of people who get to Beginners Mind as devs is as much Survivorship Bias as anything else.
Yeah, I think the definition of "done" is a great thing to focus on here. For me, the definition is generally, "works for the user". But waterfall-ish processes encourage developers to think that done means "finished the code". But that's really "finished the code for their first understanding of somebody's first guess at what might solve a user problem".
If something isn't "done" until it has at least survived a first user test, then we don't need to be quite as egoless, because we are a participant in the larger problem-solving process.
I also think your point on being overwhelmed matters a lot. Too many software processes are push-based, where an executive is cramming things in the hopper and insisting on a pace. I like pull-based processes. E.g., having a kanban board with WIP limits, so an individual unit of work takes as long as it takes.
IMO the problem is that OSS developers hate any change that’s made to a UI because it breaks their workflow. As a result, a lot of OSS has old style interfaces, and it’s hard for UI designers to convince the others to make changes.
I think that more accurate would be saying is that OSS is often developed by people already using it and used to weird interface and not benefiting from it being usable by newbies.
So there is much smaller motivation to improve it.
And avoiding change for the sake of change is something that I actually like. One of reasons why I switched to LibreOffice and later to Linux is because I am not fan of relearning interface without a good reason.
-------------
But nearly every software would benefit from running small scale UX test. Take three people, ask them to do the most basic tasks - and fix the most common problems.
Your software is much harder to use than you expect.
Related is this: sometimes you have been using a piece of software for such a long time you can no longer judge whether the user-interface (UI) is any good. You've simply mastered the steps (and keyboard shortcuts) needed to accomplish a task and it now feels "natural", no matter how clunky or clumsy the steps remain.
And there's also a widespread belief among developers that making a task easier in the UI means "dumbing down" the UI. Or that making software easier to use means it could never satisfy "power users".
Developers love to revel in arcane interface minutiae (especially for command-line tools). They think it's equal to acquiring a skill or knowledge. But it's not really. Instead, it is the perpetration of a clumsy method to completing a task. But now that the developer has mastered that method (and that feeling of "knowledge" gained as a consequence), they won't easily let go. Or be easily persuaded of a different method.
Instead, it is the perpetration of a clumsy method to completing a task.
Not in every case. For experienced/professional/power users of any software, what matters is maximizing the information density in time of both input and output. Sometimes the best way to do that appears arcane.
I want to be able to accomplish much in as little time as possible, so I want a high temporal input information density. So that might mean using a mouse instead of a trackpad for precise aiming and scrolling, or using keyboard shortcuts instead of on-screen icons. It might mean there are different mouse behaviors for ctrl-drag, middle-click-drag, etc.
I also want to be able to receive as much information about the state of the application as possible in as little time as possible. Too little density and I have to keep more state in my head and spend time jumping around. Too much density and the senses are overwhelmed. This might mean, for a CLI tool, that zero output is the best output in case of success. But for long-running processes that might be a progress bar under a list of log entries. For GUIs, the optimum might mean that there is a lot of information and a lot of actions on screen with reduced whitespace, which seems intimidating at first but is necessary to communicate the state of the system to the user.
So convincing any power user to "let go" is like asking someone to give up their legs for a scooter. Sure, it's simpler to go places in mostly straight lines with a scooter, but linear motion is only one of the many things people do with their legs that justify the arcane UI of unstable bipedal locomotion. We walk along streets, run along trails, jump over obstacles, dance, spar, climb, swim, etc.
This is not to say that scooters have no place, or that every tool is at a global optimum. But any "different method" that someone wants to propose will very deservedly receive pushback if it does not fulfill the full purpose of the old method.
A good example is the UI of Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, which is not at all intuitive. I was incredibly confused when I first started using them, and it took me a long time to become proficient. But now I've mastered them, the absolute last thing I want is for them to do a UI overhaul.
I do not hate when an application I use revamp its UI (e.g. Pixelmator -> Pixelmator Pro). However, developing good UX is as hard as developing robust code and high performance algorithms.
Unless the devs get UX improvement backwards (cough GNOME cough), there's nothing to worry IMHO. OTOH, for a CLI application, backwards compatibility and/or graceful depreciation is key.
Modern "UX" is just a failed premise. It favors hand holding for the novice, which someone won't remain forever, over efficiency and control for the experienced user.
"Old style" interfaces are universally better than tabletized crap, and had as much and higher quality research into the choices behind them. It's not limited to OSS. Apple is a glaring example of that right now. The Mac Human Interface Guidelines and the thought that went into the Mac OS were phenomenal. Contemporary style changes driven by users' familiarity with tabletized (or dare I say "Fischer-Price") UIs are regressions. Visible things become hidden to look "cleaner," keyboard control is ignored, oversized buttons are favored.
Much of OSS UI/UX however does not follow such excellent guidelines, but is rather a kitchen sink, and that does not in truth well serve either power users nor novice. As you are suggesting, the design must have thoughtful work applied.
I love those blender tutorial videos, were they dont even bother to tell you were in the menue the button is for something, and instead go "press key x y z" - though 2.8 has greatly improved the whole affair.
This should in theory allow for a complete redesign of the gui though, as the core audience uses shortkeys anyway.
Its also from the facts that almost every "redesign" or presentation for one, is often full regression in use ability terms.
It does help when software users that happen to have good UI chops suggest redesign because then it often improves things, as I've seen happen with KDE and Budgie, at least. But pulling in UX "designers" who have no skin in the game and letting them play around is how you get ridiculous unusable crap like Google Pay, Apple Music, Windows 8, whatever Google is calling their Android UI now, and more.
I think a good approach sometimes is to decouple UI from other things as much as possible, then make "classic" UI optional for the people who value that while the improvements are worked on separately. It depends on the project if that just ends up being too much of a hassle or not.
What I find difficult is the lack of communication. Programming UI changes is hard work, and when a developer isn’t convinced of the benefit to users, it makes it seem like the change is being made for the ego of the UX designer.
Thank you for the Sibelius video link. It's very good indeed.
The thing is (unmentioned in Tantacrul's Audacity video) is that Audacity's UI has always - from day one - been a terrible copy of the much beloved SoundEdit16, afaict. I just want something as easy to use as SoundEdit was, if Tantacrul is reading.
I wish so too! Being a UI/UX person who has an eye for good design, I'd love to contribute to OSS projects.
I think a lot more OSS projects should reach out for contributions in improving usability — it's almost always what separates OSS projects from paid alternatives.
Does anyone know what this means? The code is GPL v2. It has 126 contributors on github. The project doesn't seem to use copyright assignment. What has been acquired?
MuseScore is also GPL, so I assume there is no intent to attempt to change the license. This probably is more about the organization, funding, direction, etc.
This is how the Bukkit disaster happened. Microsoft "bought" the leading Minecraft server software, hiring some of the major developers and I guess not telling anyone else, and some of them were unamused that they were (in their eyes) doing free work for Microsoft when their colleagues got hired. So they rescinded their GPL licensing of their contributions and sent DMCA notices. Which pretty much ended the project, except for Spigot continuing development in the form of patches that the server operator applies with a script.
It should be noted that the authors didn't rescind any licenses, per se. Rather, distributing binary versions of Bukkit was always in violation of the GPL (since the bundled Mincraft code did not have source available). The former author simply started enforcing this. Important distinction since rescinding the license would be a far more legally/ethically dubious action.
The license covers the code, not the trademark. You can use the code/software as long as you observe the license, you can use the trademark as long as you follow the rules set out by the trademark owner. E.g. you can totally use the code to make your own audio editor and distribute it, but the trademark terms might not allow you to call it "Audacity".
Copyright law and trademark law are different topics and have different ruling. Most software licenses (except 4 clause BSD or PHP License and few others) don't make any claims about names.
One might try to argue that a name used in software code and distributed under some open source license also gives rights to the name by being source ... but to my knowledge there are no court decisions.
Trademarks are actually still useful for open-source software, since they ensure that a malicious or incompetent party can't ruin the name of your software by shipping a modification that does bad things.
Jason Rohrer ran into this very issue when other developers made their own client for his game, using a variation on the game's name. They didn't respond to him asking that they don't use the name, and eventually he was convinced that trademarking the name is the right tool to project it. The original game client is still open-source (and maybe the server too, dunno).
GPL isn't "do whatever you want". It's "do whatever you want, as long as you let future users do whatever they want". That's what makes it such a good licence for the community.
Well, imagining it from the buyer's perspective, if I bought Audacity then now I can make changes to it and while there may be other forks, these changes will be likely be recognized as "the" Audacity.
So if for example I wanted to cross-promote my other products or add a "pro" paid version of some sort, I could do that, and those would end up in the main version most people are downloading.
Not saying they are doing this, but the copyright owner can fork the GPL work and create a closed source version if they want to. The GPL doesn't restrict the copyright owner in any way.
But as GP mentioned, the project has 126 contributors on GitHub who each own part of the copyright. So Muse Group doesn't own the full copyright of Audacity now.
>But as GP mentioned, the project has 126 contributors on GitHub who each own part of the copyright
Not sure about this case, but iirc you can have contributors to a project without them owing "part of the copyright" for the stuff they wrote. You just have to make them assign the copyright to you if they want to include their code in the project (they can always fork if they don't like that, but the original authors still get the copyright to the core project).
Also, and orthogonal, a lot of time there are 1-2-5-10 core devs, and the rest 100s are just some small changes here and there, fixes to the documentation, some plugin contribution, etc. In other words, easily writen out, if it comes to that.
Yes, I suppose they would have to back up time and take an earlier branch where the number of significant contributors was much smaller and easier to cull down.
If they wanted to do that there's no need to get an ok from 100 or so devs, because you only need a working version, not to be able to use avery single release with the new license. VLC was able to do it (albeit the change was from gpl to lgpl), there's probably 10 or so devs that owns 80% or so percent of the copyrighted code from the current version, once you get those to agree with the change, in the worst case you have to rewrite 20% of your software.
My first reaction was "oh no..". Audacity has to be one of the most beloved and widely recommended software of all time. It's not often that an aquisition like this goes well for very long.
After looking at MuseScore and UltimateGuitar, however, it looks like they are also free and have a similar aesthetic to Audacity. Maybe this will work out after all.
What scares me is musescore.com. That website went from being a largely free repository of sheet music to a subscription service paying into the music industry, with no support for CC style licenses (it's either public domain or paywalled), locking everyone's sheet music retroactively behind a paywall regardless of actual license, sometimes in violation of said licenses (e.g. anything with a BY-NC or similar style license). None of the profits go to independent creators, only to a few major rights associations, regardless of who actually owns the music. They then tried to threaten folks who had written download tools with vague and ridiculous threats. [1]
It seems these days they support CC (finally...), but not any ad-hoc or third party licenses. So most of the music I'm interested in, which is legal to distribute sheet music of for free but not commercially (but under a non-CC license), is still paywalled in violation of its copyright.
MuseScore the software is fine, but the MuseScore.com fiasco has left a really bad taste in my mouth. I hope none of that nonsense bleeds over into the development teams of the actual OSS software, but absent any kind of apology or change of direction MuseScore.com, I'm scared.
> Otherwise, I will have to transfer information about you to lawyers who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content.
This is by far the worst takedown request I've ever seen in Github. The physically find you is especially concerning, since the owner of the repository seems to be a Chinese national.
Apparently by the time the takedown was written, the API was public but the documentation was taken down. The next replies don't make it better, and it seems they don't have a leg to stand on to send a proper DMCA.
I also had no idea they belonged to Ultimate Guitar. Honestly I lost some of the respect I had for MuseScore and Audacity teams after seeing this.
The way the issue is worded is not how things work in the civilised world.
The affected parties have first to prove or at least argue that the software is doing anything illegal. The repository owners were using a documented, public, authenticated, third party API that was only taken down after the issue was posted. This is not illegal.
If there were anything illegal like piracy happening, it should have been resolved is by having the affected parties send a DMCA to GitHub, just like in the YouTube-dl situation, just like the repo owner asked Daniel J. Rey to do.
This is how it's done. Not by sending lies ("illegally using our private API" that was actually publicly documented) and making mafia-like threats ("will physically find you").
If you are committing crimes in China, the police (i.e. the Chinese government) will find you and stop you. I don't know why this is a point of contention. That is a fact.
If the API was protected in any way, the usage can fall under anti-circumvention. That's how the DMCA works. This is also a fact.
We can dispute what actually happened, and we can dispute invididual laws in China (or in EU, or the US), but your assertions seem to be suggesting that it's wrong that these things happen at all, which is not true.
Making a program is not illegal, as long as it's not circumventing anything. If it were, SEND A DMCA. FOLLOW THE LAW.
The API was public, authenticated, documented and intended for third party developers. Even if it was reverse engineered there is still legal grounds for that, as seen by the YouTube-dl situation.
If there was any law-breaking, it would be the people downloading scores and MuseGroup for distributing them.
Repeating what I said below:
Even if musescore-downloader was doing illegal things (and I would argue it wasn't, since there was no circumvention of anything), the law should be followed by both sides, no excuses. That means sending a DMCA instead of a threat.
This may have been an accident where the legal notice was sent out before taking the API offline. If that's the case I agree they messed up. The DMCA may not apply here.
> Otherwise, I will have to transfer information about you to lawyers who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content.
It's not like he's reporting them to the Gestapo for termination.
He's reporting them to the police of a country for a copyright complaint. The fact that the country is China doesn't mean anything ominous.
Besides the "state persecution" thing, there's regular police and court work in China, every day, for 1.6 billion people, and millions of criminal, civic, business disputes, and other such cases, which is where this will fall into.
That it's China probably makes it even lighter, not harder, since copyright abuses there are seen much more lightly than in the west.
musescore.com has some dark patterns in the their pricing, too. Just 2 weeks ago, when I couldn't find out how much it costs, I asked my friend circle. They pointed me to some indirect references to how much it costs, but it's not out there in front. You also have to make an account in order to see the price.
Plus musescore.com has numerous shenanigans with payment, ending subscriptions, etc [0]
It leads me to wonder, what is the other side of this deal? Will muscore.com repeat what they did with the free musescore software and utilize it to ensnare a large number of community resources? What kind of deal are the Audacity devs getting offered? I hope tantacrul doesn't become the face of a dumpsterfire.
I found it amusing that the originator of the takedown email commented with this:
>We are genuinely committed to open source and do want to make as much as possible as free as possible. The fact that I am sitting here and writing in these discussions at all should be evidence of our commitment to open source and engagement vs. simply passing the issue on to lawyers to deal with.
And then this next (and final) comment ended with this:
The copyright holders should just upload the sheet music to a different website. There is no requirement for anyone to redistribute a piece of Creative Commons content for free. That's true even with the NC licenses, in that case, the only real option for non-compliance is for the copyright holder to file a takedown notice to get the material removed. I know it seems counter-intuitive since you probably want to download that music, but this is what you're actually asking for.
If the copyright holders are absent then not much is going to be done about this -- that's one of the major reasons why artists join these large copyright holding organizations, to handle this stuff for them!
I'm sorry, I don't understand. Can you explain what you mean by that? Then more broadly, can you explain how the creation of more GPL-licensed source code can ever be a bad thing?
An extreme example since you asked a very absolute question:
I sell software to the Chinese government to track down dissidents and kill them with drones. I release a lot of code under a GPL license and use the funds to promote OSS software. Most people wouldn't consider this a positive for the world even though more GPL software is created. Or in other words many people do not believe that "the ends justify the means" is a valid reason for something.
Using the same logic, you can come to the opposite conclusion.
They are distinct, stopping the latter would not stop the former, as such they are not linked.
Let me try saying this another way. Tell your story again but where the decision to be involved in open source software was not made. Was the sum total of badness injected into this world quantifiably less?
Essentially it boils down to this: if you see value to society in allowing people to share musical scores with each other, that's fundamentally at odds with a libre software philosophy. Because if you let people share music on a platform, they will inevitably share copyrighted melodies, which means not only that you are forced to monetize to be able to strike licensing arrangements, or else be sued into oblivion. And you are also required to enforce that the sharing software be used as intended in order to placate rightsholders, or else be sued into oblivion. And it's that "as intended" that is fundamentally different from how many of us think about FOSS.
There's a lot of corporate speak in the official post here related to the emplacement of score downloads behind the paywall in the first place https://musescore.com/groups/improving-musescore-com/discuss... but it's the same sentiment: if MuseScore.com doesn't put in place paywalls for downloads and enforce them, they will lose their ability to negotiate with major music publishers, and they see that outcome being a net loss to society of access to digital scores.
Frankly, I think this is a reasonable tradeoff. MuseScore sees monetization and adherence to these restrictions as a necessary step to ensure they have the resources and community to promote music literacy. That's a distinct mission from, say, GNU's mission, and just as valid. And of all the corporations using GPL for visions distinct from GNU's vision (here's looking at you, AWS), this one at least has a reason beyond being a naked cash grab.
The discussion stops being nuanced as soon as the company starts the discussion with a threat such as "will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content".
At the point the email in the Github issue was written the API was public. It was removed after the repository owner responded, as can be seen on the Internet Archive.
Nothing ever justifies offering a public API and getting people to use it, to only later backtrack, accuse users of "stealing" and threaten developers with use of physical force.
If the problem is caused by major industries, then just remove the previously public API and don't send mafia-like threats.
I think the wording of that email is bad, but your assessment of the situation is incorrect. The threat of legal action is real and it comes from the copyright holders. The company can't do anything about that, they are being threatened by the same copyright holders. Removing the public API doesn't really change the situation.
"Threat of legal action" is MuseScore letting/recommending the copyright holders to send a DMCA, like in youtube-dl. This is even what the repository owners say in the first few comments.
Threatening someone with words like "Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content" is extremely serious and shouldn't be casually dismissed.
This is not "badly worded". This is either a lie, or MuseScore is dealing with institutions that behave like the Mafia. There is no excuse for either of those behaviours.
Also, you seem to be implying that the company had the opportunity to work together and alert the repo owner, but instead they decided to double down on the threats and accusations. This is also completely unacceptable.
I think you may have missed some comments farther down the issue chain:
>If MuseScore was not acquired and continued down the current path, it would have been already shut down by now. This is what many people do not understand. MuseScore was going to be shut down if it was not acquired and a plan put in place with rights holders.
>Any site or system of distribution that includes copyrighted works and is done so under agreement with rights holders and according to their conditions will be shut down. This is simply reality.
The "excuse" for those behaviors is that they got to stay in business. I don't agree with all the actions of the rights holders but that's the way it is. If you feel it's better for there to be no Musescore at all, I would advise you to just not use the website. There's lots of other free sites that will host Creative Commons-licensed media. If you're looking for someone to negotiate hard against the rights holders, you would have better luck trying with a bigger company like Apple or Spotify.
No. There are never any excuses for making false accusations, like claiming that a publicly, documented, authenticated, third-party API was being used illegally.
There is also no excuse for sending threats of use of physical force by CCP instead of sending a proper DMCA.
Even if musescore-downloader was doing illegal things (and I would argue it wasn't, since there was no circumvention of anything), the law should be followed by both sides, no excuses. That means sending a DMCA instead of a threat.
One, it's possible the API was being used illegally. If that's the issue then that should be what's discussed, but let's save that for up thread.
Two, the DMCA seems to not apply here, if this is a Chinese citizen enforcing legal rulings against another Chinese citizen. That is a perfectly valid situation to call the police, in any country. The message getting relayed through a third party (Musescore) doesn't really change it.
Three, this argument is going around in circles, I think a great option would be to contribute to the author's musescore alternative: https://github.com/LibreScore/LibreScore
Nope. Even if the API were used illegally it still doesn't make it right to make threats of possible usage of physical force. Ask nicely and/or send a DMCA, period.
The DMCA absolutely applies here, since the whole request was for the repository on Github to be removed, and Github is an American website that follows American law and receives DMCA requests.
It's my understanding that Github also operates in China and has to follow Chinese law, so that Chinese citizens are allowed to use it. Maybe you can advise on Chinese law? I don't see why it's not right to get the police involved if it turns out to be a criminal matter in China. (Not saying it is, I don't know)
DMCA absolutely does apply here, as Github is an American company and has to follow it to keep its safe harbour status.
There's also no indication that Xmader is a Chinese citizen. The Anti-CPP message on his profile could also mean he's from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or anywhere in the world. The person making the threat seems to be Russian and MuseScore seems to be registered in Belgium.
Even if China could be involved, if MuseScore prefers to solve this using physical force (their words) rather than a simple DMCA, that paints them in an even worse picture than anyone ever in the history of open source.
This was a mafia-like threat, plain and simple. There's absolutely no justification for it, even if it's possible to happen.
Maybe the company has more information than you do, we don't know that. I certainly hope anyone in open source feels safe to call the police when a criminal violation is happening, regardless of what it is. Again we can debate individual laws and individual enforcement actions, but comparing any laws or police anywhere to the mafia is nonsensical. Let's focus on the facts.
As explained, there is no violation here, since the API was being used as intended.
Also, considering the owner of the repository considers the Chinese state a dictatorship, it's pretty fair to assume "calling the Chinese police on him" doesn't mean anywhere near the same as it means calling the police in Europe or America. This is clearly the worst kind of threat you can make to this developer.
You seem to be giving all the possible benefit of the doubt to the company while giving less than none to the repository owner, even when they provided information about how what they're doing is not breaking the law, and provided a proper way to solve the issue, DMCA. At the same time, the company hasn't provided much.
I don't see why anyone should assume that the company knows anything more than that but is still resorting to threats instead of solving this the easy way.
The accusations don't have a leg to stand on, otherwise a simple DMCA would have solved the issue, period.
EDIT: Also, I don't see how this conversation can continue. If you don't see a problem with calling the CCP police on someone whose only personal information we know is that he's anti-CCP, then I don't think we have enough ethical common ground to even continue this discussion.
If the complaint is as easily dismissable as you say it is, without apparently even needing the consult of a lawyer experienced in Chinese law, then it seems no harm was done. The repository is still up months later, so that's where I'm giving credit to the repository owner. And obviously if the person is not a citizen of China then talks of investigation by the Chinese police wouldn't really be relevant, so again no harm done. The letter can be dismissed without needed to post it on Github and make an issue of it.
However I would still encourage open source authors to be educated on Chinese law and to avoid telling Chinese citizens to do things that could potentially get them arrested in China. If there is a real legal threat there it's irresponsible to ignore it. So in the end it's probably good that it was posted on Github.
Edit to respond to your edit: That's not my view. The issue is that the police have already been called by a different party. (or the equivalent of it, i.e. the company is contractually obligated to contact the government in the event of a violation, under threat of legal action from that government) The email appears to just be informing them of that fact. In my view, that is the only responsible thing to do. The only other option is to just not inform them, and have the police show up anyway.
You just said "Let's focus on the facts" but you are presenting another invalid theory. The email specifically mentions that nobody was contacted: "Otherwise, I will have to transfer information about you to lawyers who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government...". The email is just a threat to install fear on the maintainer. There's no Chinese police involved yet, no laws being broken, no private API being used, no DMCA, there's nothing. You're grasping at straws. Please stop defending the indefensible.
Again, they may be under a non-negotiable contract with a government to say that. The replies further down the issue seem to suggest that is the case. I don't defend the actions of the parties responsible -- But the fact is if there are no Chinese laws being broken, I don't believe you or I are in the position to make that judgement, or at least that case hasn't been made so far. If your concern is with an oppressive government, please don't attack people who are also being oppressed by that government, and please don't suggest people ignore potentially real threats that could get them arrested by that government. I agree with you, I don't want the author of this software to get in legal trouble.
Again you're making conjectures and not sticking to facts. The only person attacking a person oppressed by the CCP is the MuseScore developer. He's also the one threatening to involve the CCP. And you're being an apologist for them. It wasn't an alert, nor an attempt to make the plugin legal. The "Otherwise, I will have to transfer information" is a pure and simple threat. And you're the one making excuses for that behaviour.
If this is a real threat then MuseScore really handled it the worst way possible and they should be ashamed for purposefully threatening to endanger a CCP citizen. If it's not, it's just a mafia-style shakedown.
Once again: if you don't see a problem with calling the CCP police on someone whose only personal information we know is that he's anti-CCP, then I don't think we have enough ethical common ground to even continue this discussion.
Again, musescore may already be involved with the CCP for contractual reasons. Basically all companies who do business in China are involved with them in some way. These things happen for reasons beyond their control, e.g. an investor sells everything off to foreign investors who then change the terms. If you're being careful, you have to assume they are already compromised. I don't apologize or make excuses, it's just basic safety. My view is that if this person is really worried about threats coming from a government, it would be wise to take those threats seriously. Github profiles are public, so it's not exactly hard for them to find this information.
Edit: I agree with you that if this musescore developer is lying about that, then that would be wrong of them. But I don't think I have enough information to make that judgement. So I think that's where we're disconnected. At least for open source projects, my view is to take any and all potential legal threats seriously until the matter is resolved with the lawyers.
This seems misdirected to me. Not all principled stances can be fairly compared to religious zealotry. Standing up for the rights of users strikes me as pretty useful.
One of the takedown emails to a Github repository owner says "who will cooperate with github.com and Chinese government to physically find you and stop the illegal use of licensed content".
I think any reasonable person would find this unethical mafia-like behaviour.
Possibly relevant, MuseScore has a CLA requiring that all code contributors grant MuseScore the right to use the code in proprietary software. Audacity doesn't have such a clause and I don't know if they'll be able to get past contributors to sign such an agreement.
Beloved is a little too strong of word choice for me.
The UI is garbage. The plugin architecture is rough. It's difficult to workflow -- no automation is really available. Audacity produces good results, at the cost of an insanely high requirement for patience and experience. What you are actually in love with is the creative process of editing and creating audio.
As a project, audacity has languished for a long time. It has the potential to be great -- but it's not there, now.
The great about Audacity it's that it's a great DAW starter. You can record, edit, multitrack, mix and apply effects.
It's fast, out of the box, multiplatform... and I haven't used it in years, but that's mostly because Reaper it's too great, the only thing I miss it's audacity loading times.
Now I think Audacity has only a few bottlenecks, the main workflow it's not that broken.
If what they say it's accomplished and they prioritize VTS non-destructive effects, improve the Timeline management and other UX details. I could see Audacity present in the majority of home studios and the software behind a lot of professional works (not big studios, but enough for self publish). I now a couple of local bands that recorded their demo with audacity, a cheap interface and a sm57 mic.
...and if I can ask maybe add support for ASIO (something hard to happen becauses licences, but I can dream).
Much agreed on the history of Audacity. It has so much capability, but it's high time we fixed UIs that inspire anger or still depend on Athena widgets.
Obviously it does what it does well. It can edit audio quickly. I'll never use it for anything else aside from chopping up samples. If you want a full DAW use Logic.
UltimateGuitar is a horrible website full of dirty UX to force certain behaviors and block others. You wanted to zoom in on a tab? That's a paid subscription feature! Trying to browse on your phone while at a practice session with your band? Download our app, so we can track you, show you ads and prevent other basic functionality! They're constantly changing these and implementing new paywalls and ways to ruin their product while the core experience of tabs never improves.
I fully agree. Trying to use the browser version of ultimate guitar on a 6 inches smartphone is a very frustrating experience. I remember subscribing to the pro version of ultimate guitar about 5 years ago when the app was a must go and in my opinion, it's just been downwards since then
I use it because it does have a lot of songs. The search on it is the worst and the UI has its own back button that is not easy to use. Most good apps on Android let you use the devices back button.
I'm quite concerned about this. I use Audacity quite heavily and have for many years. It's become an important part of my workflow. I'm not opposed to it in theory but after seeing how they handled Muse Score, I really worry about how Muse Group will attempt to monetize Audacity.
If anybody has insight into the plans, I'd love to hear them.
Once you get past the cute intro it’s a really great history of audacity, interview with some of the creators, and an overview of the ui challenges the new head of ui/ux has to face (keep it simple, but make it powerful, etc.)
I don't need that, I need to know what is going to happen to an important piece of software I rely on to do my work, and which is one of the only quality free software options for.
A big argument/selling point of the FOSS model has always been that it's compatible with capitalism. You are allowed to sell your software and build it as part of a commercial entity; the only difference is that you have to share the source code to anyone you sell to. There's no reason any company developing FOSS can't be bought/sold.
Seems like they’re just hiring the maintainer and maybe their copyrights. Given the number of contributors, not sure how useful one persons contributions are.
Sounds like they want to connect it to their cloud services and improve the UI. They say in the comments they’re not looking to relicense and it’s hard to see how they could.
> Given the number of contributors, not sure how useful one persons contributions are.
OTOH, they are probably not spending too much money as a result. While acquiring better visibility and (hopefully) more goodwill from the audio enthusiast community.
You can buy the copyright from the copyright holder(s). That seems quite straightforward if the holder is a single entity, like with Qt, for example. If it's multiple entities, as with Audacity, then in theory it's no different, but practically speaking I'm not sure how they have done this.
They probably hired the main developers and have the copyrights for their work transferred to them. In practice, it has no meaningful impact since relicensing is (nearly) impossible due to the distributed copyright among all contributors of Audacity (which is a good thing!).
Then "Main Audacity developers hired by Muse Group" seems like a sensible headline. I'm not sure why they went with this headline. Maybe they sold it to their bosses in simple terms like "we're acquiring Audacity"?
Wasn't Expressjs the framework acquired by some company? It seems simple, a company take control of the official repository/webpage from its original author/developer in exchange for money.
Read the comment from Daniel Ray under the article. In short, Muse Group seems to be planning to continue their established business model for Audacity and possibly other future acquisitions. That is, offering standalone open source software with optional paid cloud services.
Audacity lacks very few features IMO. Maybe a revamp on broken plugins and suport to drum sequencing. More than that will force the daw to change UI paradigm, a thing that will hurt badly in usability. The big reason Audacity is so successful is how easy it is to beginners to use.
There's an example up higher in the thread of them being jerks to a developer and threatening to send the government of a user after them for providing access to things via APIs they provided
Source: https://youtu.be/RMWNvwLiXIQ
Well worth watching his other videos too, even if you don’t use musical notation software. Funny and insightful commentary on software usability in general.