On Tue, 8 Mar 2011, Pierre Massat wrote:
I was trying to get Ardour to work last night and i came accross
the forum on their website. I must say i was quite shocked to see
how many posts were about money. I was equally surprized to see
that the latest full version of Ardour isn't free (although you
can name your price).
"Name your price" is actually a characteristic of the download site,
not the software.
From what I read, Ardour remains FLOSS nonetheless.
1) What are the economics of open source software, and how
sustainable is the model?
FLOSS is not an economic model, it's a set of licenses (and of
potential future licenses with the same basic characteristics).
You use the license as a tool to come up with an economic model of
your choice, but there are many possibilities, both with a pure
FLOSS license (which is the case of Ardour), and with a hybrid
approach (involving proprietary licenses in some way).
How does it work for Pd?
There is no such system for the Pd community. Each developer has
his/her own "economic model", which usually means something
noneconomic like donating plenty of time for little return.
2) I get the feeling that open source developpers used to think
that the idea of free (free beer...) software was cool, but 10 to
15 years down the line (that is, now) they're beginning to realize
that they can't keep on doing this forever. Am I wrong here?
It possibly happens to *lots* of people, but it doesn't make the
FLOSS movement getting any smaller.
I have been considering making a donation since i've been using Pd
extensively for a few years now. But could someone tell me exactly
how it works? Who gets the money?
The person who gets the money is the person you send it to.
And i never use GEM or Gridflow (cause i have no need for it at
the moment), so i don't see why part of my donation should go to
Mathieu or GEM's author(s).
What makes you think that GEM's authors and I are somehow not
contributing anything significant to Pd-vanilla ?
