There are a bunch of newly minted millionaires this week, after it was announced that Stack OverFlow would be acquired for $1.8 billion by European tech investment firm Prosus. While not exactly a household name, Prosus is a big player in the Chinese tech scene, where it has about a 30% stake in Chinese internet company Tencent. They trimmed their holdings in the company a bit recently, raising $15 billion in cash, which we assume will be used to fund the SO purchase. As with all such changes, there’s considerable angst out in the community about how this could impact everyone’s favorite coding help site. The SO leadership are all adamant that nothing will change, but only time will tell.
And speaking of trouble in the community, if you thought Audacity’s troubles had passed, think again. It appears that Audacity’s new owners, Muse Group, are now making contributors to the open-source audio project sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) in order to contribute code to the project. The stated reason is that Muse wants to change Audacity to a GPLv3 license, which it can’t do for the existing code written under GPLv2. They say the CLA and subsequent license change will allow them to distribute Audacity on platforms where they currently aren’t welcome, like Apple’s AppStore. It all sounds perfectly reasonable, but after the ill-conceived attempt to bake telemetry into the code, the community isn’t having any of it. They have a point — if a CLA can be used to change license terms, there’s nothing stopping it from changing to a comple ..
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