> James is just one person who makes a living, barely, by providing an > excellent tool for computer musicians. It is unlikely that you will create a > better tool than SuperCollider. But you may cut into his sales enough that > he can no longer afford to support it. That will probably not help people as > much as you hope.
I thought about this for a while... I know a bit of James' situation... But... I think it's a pity SuperCollider is closed proprietary software. When there are bugs (and there are some), I'd like them to be fixed, and if they're not gonna be fixed, I'd like to do it myself. If his sales would be cut, that would mean GNUcollider would be good enough as an alternative. And as soon as that is really the case, there's also a hugh user/developer base, so there would be a much more supported platform. I think people using a Mac and SuperCollider won't stop using that for a while, and so new people will learn about SC, and start buying it. If there is a GNUcollider, that is not as fancy/stable as SC yet, a lot of people, who only started to know collider through GNUcollider will go for SC, because it's more stable/fancy. It's like Max vs. PD/jMax. There are hardly any people at the conservatory I'm studying who use PD. Everybody who is into the Max paradigm uses Max. What would be better of course, would be that James would make SC GPL. If he would do that, I would be paying (or donate?) 250 US$ as soon as I heard of it. > So rather than steal all the ideas from SuperCollider, why don't you invent > something better?! Design a new language and create a new musical paradigm! Would it really be stealing? Isn't it using the idea of SuperCollider? And why create a new paradigm when the SC-way of doing it isn't available freely yet. You have to understand me. I really like the stuff James is doing, but I think it's a pity that it's not available to everyone freely. And free doesn't mean that there shouldn't be money involved. I feel that people, companies and institutions using free software should donate money to the people who create free software. I haven't donated a lot myself, but being a student I'm financially not in the situation to do so, it would even harm the time I could spend on making, discussing and thinking about free software myself. greetz, Kasper
