As far as I’m aware, contributor license agreements can include a clause stating that you agree to hand over copyright on submission of code. If every contributor has signed the CLA, there is only only one copyright holder, making relicensing easy.
However, successfully using this to relicense to something less open is extremely rare, and this isn’t a concern anyway as they don’t have a CLA.
I should probably add: if it becomes proprietary, the remaining soft fork will likely die. Turns out very few people have the technical knowledge for Audacity.
If you want to read the telemetry controversy/drama, I found this one I’d read years ago: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835
I remember feeling a bit bad for the maintainers. There’s a lot of complaining for a minor and optional change, but at the same time it’s interesting that they added telemetry anyway. (Not unmodified however)
As far as I remember, Audacity’s maintainers, previously just some volunteers with no organisation, decided to sell the ownership of the project to a company with some guitar platform. Nothing changed at first, they employed the maintainers to work on the same project they were already working on.
Then they started adding controversial telemetry and some soft forks appeared. I vaguely also remember hearing that there’s some contract that the company owns the source code, so relicensing to a proprietary licence is easy and possible in future. All the new software the company launches is proprietary, and there’s signs they want to tie it all together into a single suite.
Nothing majorly bad has happened to Audacity, yet. But decisions are no longer community driven, as shown by the telemetry drama. I fear it’s a matter of time.
What stops those open source projects having that same rugpull? AOSP was open source and for a long time could be installed on one’s phone indefinitely.
You could argue ownership, but if Audacity can be bought then so can nearly anything.
As much as it’s dumb, many other places (such as Australia, where I live) are similar at this point.
If you want something not Google, I used to have Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone before Australia’s 3G network was switched off. It would have to be an older Fairphone however.
Pale Moon is criticised precisely because its developers don’t have the resources to keep it fast, feature complete and secure.