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.

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.

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.

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.

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").

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.

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.

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 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?

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

> (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.)

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!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMWNvwLiXIQ

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.

I accept that this is easier on smaller, or new projects.

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.

That’s when I understood that I had a disability.

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

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.

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).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability

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.