It has not been widely publicized, but Muse group acquired rights to code contributions from many of the major contributors to the codebase. This doesn’t negate the GPL license, but would probably permit them greater control and maybe the ability to make a non-GPL version, but they haven’t suggested they are interested in that. If they did that, it would kill off the huge user support community and volunteer coder staff, and because the 3.0 codebase is still available, it could be forked from there or their latest GPL release. They may have plans to require license assignment from future third-party contributors, which might reduce the volunteer developer community, but it is not super-active anyway. I’m sure there are bug fix contributions that have not completely been acquired–from anonymous contributors, contributors who have died, and others who are just unfindable, but these would mostly have been reviewed, revised, and committed by identifiable team members who did license their contributions. There could be an issue with these contributions if Muse wanted to roll a pro version not under the GPL. It might require a substantial code audit if they wanted to do this which would be a huge obstacle, but If they tried that and somebody complained, it would mean the un-acquired code would then be clearly identified, and Muse could just pull it out or rewrite it or pay the contributor relicense it.
But audacity development has been primarily in maintenance mode for years, and if one or two central contributors were to leave (which will happen sooner or later as the team is greying, as you can see in the video), its current development pace might just essentially end. it is not clear to me audacity will have a sustainable future without something like this happening, and it would certainly have had little chance of any major improvements or major rethinking. This also means that Muse has a chance to reinvigorate development and create a long-term development path–a single fulltime developer would make a huge difference, and audacity might still be around 20 years from now.
My hope is that they are careful to not try to build it into something ONLY pros can use, which some people seem to be pushing for. There are a lot of users who seem to whine because it isn’t reaper or ardour or some other full-featured DAW or sequencer or looper or whatever. But audacity has 200-million+ downloads because it never tried to be something that audio nerds would want, and full-featured audio workstations are unusable for most normies. It has almost certainly helped launch a million podcasts, and if Muse makes it more difficult for a novice to use its core functionality, a redesign will fail. Its core is its easy setup, one-button recording, ease of use for minor edits, 2-3 plugins like noise removal, and export capabilities. If they can maintain that and maybe give a facelift and improve workflow for people who use it a bit more seriously, it should succeed even without non-destructive effects chains or more serious multi-track capabilities or better MIDI or support for more plugins.