I don't think Audacity's 'freeware' status is in doubt. It's open source, under the GPL, so anyone can use and distribute it - provided they stick to the GPL licence conditions. You can sell it too, if you can find people willing to pay - perhaps alongside other services or a nice instruction manual.

I expect Muse, the new owners, will develop paid-for services based on Audacity and they want to make that easier and avoid future disputes. But I don't know.

If 'the community' of Audacity users don't like what Muse do with it they could always 'fork' it - take a copy, change the name, and go their own way. This is what happened with OpenOffice when people didn't like what Oracle were doing with it and created LibreOffice. The result was confusion though, so let's hope not.

I used the new version 3 for the first time yesterday. It looked and worked exactly the same.

Audacity v3 New Features