Audacity is free software, developed by a group of volunteers and distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Free software is not just free of cost (like “free beer”). It is free as in freedom (like “free speech”). Free software gives you the freedom to use a program, study how it works, improve it and share it with others. For more information, visit the Free Software Foundation.
Programs like Audacity are also called open source software, because their source code is available for anyone to study or use. There are thousands of other free and open source programs, including the Firefox web browser, the LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice office suites and entire Linux-based operating systems such as Ubuntu.
We welcome donations to support Audacity development. Anyone can contribute to Audacity by helping us with documentation, translations, user support and by testing our latest code.
Open HUB (formerly known as “Ohloh”) has statistics on the value of Audacity development. The statistics are set up by us to show only the values of Audacity-specific development, excluding the third-party code libraries Audacity uses.