On Mar 8, 2011, at 3:21 AM, Pierre Massat wrote:
Dear List,
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).
Now don't get me wrong : I think i can imagine the amount of work
that was necessary to write a software like Ardour from scratch, and
i totally understand that the team who wrote it may decide that they
should be payed for it.
This leads me to ask two questions :
1) What are the economics of open source software, and how
sustainable is the model? How does it work for Pd?
Pd has been developed over 15+ years, so that seems sustainable to
me. There are many different ways it works for Pd. There are people
like Miller and the IEM crew who are academics and working on Pd is
part of their research. I mostly make money related to Pd by teaching
it and using it in freelance projects; I have also gotten a small
stream of direct donations over the years, like maybe US$3000 total.
I think teaching Pd is a common source of income for Pd people who are
artists and/or musicians first. So those are mostly the "Pay for a
Plus" model.
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?
I don't have that feeling at all. I've been using free software since
about 1994, and the situation has really only improved from what I've
seen. There is more money out there for paying people to do free
software, and more people writing free software for a living. Things
like Kickstarter are a good example. Also many NGOs and governments
are starting to realize they get a better deal if they pay people to
work on free software than if they buy proprietary software and
support. Many grant organzations are requiring that grant-funded work
be released at free software.
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? How is it split between the
different developpers? For instance, i'm assuming that Miller
Puckette should get a fair share of the donations since we're all
using Pd vanilla at least, but i use HID a lot in my patches, so
Hans should get his share too. 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). Yet i m sure
that thousands of people use GEM, and these developpers should be
supported as well. In short, how does it work, and how do we make
this sustainable?
One thing about free software funding is that its basically the
inverse of the proprietary product model in what you pay for. In a
proprietary product, you pay for the work that has been done and
turned into a product. For free software, you get the current state
of the product for free, so instead you pay for support or you pay for
new things to be added to the product. That's what I recommend you
pay for, if you are interested in funding some development: think of
something you'd like to see improved, and fund that.
.hc
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"[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are
deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from
scarcity." -John Gilmore
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