Around 4 or 5 years ago, the Audacity project was acquired by a company that has several other open source music / audio related programs. The first few months did not go well because the company did several things with Audacity that the community didn't like (like the telemetry that others have mentioned). It seemed like the company was trying to take an uber-popular open source project and convert it into something not in keeping with community expectations. Some forks of Audacity were started.
As others have said, the controversy seems to have died down. Gentoo at least, and probably many other Linux distros, have Audacity and not the forks in their repositories.