Without GPL Oracle could make closed source improvements which RedHat could not use, giving Oracle an edge over RedHat. If RedHat then went under because of that we were stuck with a closed source Linux.
The Audacity drama is solved by GPL, you can compile your own version without telemetry. Forks will pop up and the Audacity developers will backtrack and remove the offending parts of the code.
>Ah, so it's really about making it harder for other players to improve their product?
No, it's about keeping those improvements open source.
>As for Audacity - the exact same thing would have happened with any other Open Source license; GPL doesn't make it any easier.
Yes, it does make it a lot easier since the Muse Group (assuming they don't own all copyright of Audacity, if they do the license doesn't indeed really matter) has to release all improvements as GPL and the fork can simply cherry-pick them. With a MIT/BSD style license they could just make it proprietary and then we would be stuck having to choose between an outdated Audacity and a non-free Audacity.
They can’t make it proprietary, because the developers would then go with the open fork. In this case GPL protects you from a scenario which cannot happen for other reasons.
But the improvements they make wouldn't be open source so the open source version would lack those features, which means we would be stuck having to choose between an outdated Audacity and a non-free Audacity.
Muse Group bought Audacity and are developing it now, their developers will use whatever license their employer tells them to use. They are the main developers of Audacity now. Any fork will have to compete with their work.
No, it’s just about getting compensation back for your work. If Oracle benefits from RedHat’s initial work then it is only fair that RedHat benefits from any improvements that Oracle later makes.
Assuming that Audacity does not have a CLA the GPL license will prevent muse from forking Audacity into a closed source project and continuing their development there instead. Instead they are required to keep any modifications open source, allowing users to remove aspects like the telemetry.
Erm, Oracle is literally selling repackaged RHEL; they don't need to contribute anything back to Red Hat. They would if they wanted to replace stuff with their own closed-source forks, but that would be completely unpractical for reasons not related to licensing (see how Oracle's closed source ZFS become irrelevant compared to the Open Source ZFS).
As for Audacity: its owners couldn't do that without closing their fork, which would mean splitting off with the developer community and becoming irrelevant.
For example, Oracle tried to outcompete RedHat by cloning the RedHat Linux into Oracle Unbreakable Linux.