In order not to extend the already long comment thread on #835 - within it is buried now a post by @workedintheory

#835 (comment)

mentioning multiple times CLAs (contributor license agreements) and the idea to have a "flexible" license, dual-licensing etc.

Part of our commitment to open source is a commitment to transparency. Being fully transparent, the CLA of the open source projects we support does grant some form of flexibility in licensing. But what does this mean?

I will use the example of MuseScore. The MuseScore CLA does allow for the possibility to dual license the source code as GPL and proprietary, so long as it remains also available under GPL.

But why would we ever want to do this? How could this possibly be in service of the user and user choice?

[...] it is good to have more flexible options for limited scenarios such as alternative licensing for a specific build for a specific platform to solve a specific issue (ex: excluded from platform due to GLP as in VLC case).

In more simple terms, we view the potential of dual licensing as an insurance policy in order to ensure availability for the user on the platform of their choice.

As it stands, and regarding my understanding of the mechanisms of CLA, there has never been a CLA system in place for this project. The contribution rules simply state the contributions must be compatible with GPL. No further rights were obtained from contributors through the regular channel of pull requests.

Since the project is decades old, and lists several contributors (perhaps a handful being responsible for the vast majority of commits ; but also the original authors Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg not visible in the GitHub UI), could you clarify if and how you intend to add a CLA to the project? When Muse Group obtained the control of Audacity, did you obtain the licensing rights from all the main contributors, and how do you intend to deal with commits made by persons in the past that did not sign any CLA?