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General
Yes, in almost all senses. Audacity is not only distributed
free of charge, but you are also free to do almost anything
you want with it.
Audacity is distributed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL).
You are free to use this program for personal or commercial
purposes. You are also free to give it away or sell it.
The source code to this program is freely available on the
web, and you are free to modify it for your own use, however
any changes you make must also be distributed under the GPL.
Audacity was build using wxWidgets, a software library which
is released under the less-restrictive LGPL.
For more information, please visit http://www.wxwidgets.org.
The authors of Audacity decided to release it under the GPL
for many reasons. Some of us do it out of generosity.
Some of us do it for moral reasons, because we feel that
all software should be free, while others of us believe that
there is a need for both free and commercial software in the
world.
One reason Audacity is free is so that it will be more popular.
Many of us would rather see a million people happily using
Audacity for free than have a thousand people pay us.
Most users are more friendly when they get something for free.
Yet another reason is that it encourages collaboration. If Audacity
was shareware, it is unlikely that dozens of people around the
world would have contributed code, bug fixes, documentation,
and graphics. |