[linux-audio-dev] Tracker

[Stonekeeper]

Hi Dave :)

On Fri, 2003-11-28 at 14:04, Dave Phillips wrote:
> And the truth is that there are damned few musicians working with Linux 
> even now, so the situation three years ago was considerably worse (WRT 
> the target clientele).

Yes, my thoughts exactly. Its the chicken and egg situation.

> No, no, I don't know you well enough to target you. ;-)

I'll stay semi-anon then :)

> Seriously I abhor ad hominem attacks on this or any list. IMO your 
> original post was civil and well-stated. It was also provocative (and I 
> hope it was meant to be) in a good way.

It was indeed.

> Mea culpa. I gathered from your post that Windows was your main OS for 
> making music. Nothing wrong with that, but the statement that (I'm 
> paraphrasing now) poor performance from the OS is something "par for the 
> course" for Windoze users was taken as a sad commentary on the state of 
> "what obedient consumers have learned to accept from software producers".

It was much simpler than that: The Open source philosophy (or lack of)
wouldn't be the primary  concern for musicians "jumping ship". Most
(IMHO) would simply move out of cost (I hate to think how much all those
LADSPA plugins would cost if Steinberg had sold them).

> I've heard this argument so many times for so many years, I'm starting 
> to wonder if it really holds water. I'm not sure a company writing music 
> software can actually generate considerable cash flow from services. 
> What would be the nature of most of that service ? I know there are a 
> lot of Cubase users out there, but would so many have problems enough to 
> keep Steinberg's support lines busy generating income ? What other 
> services do you think would generate the necessary level of income for 
> such a company ?

Dave, I really couldn't have put it better myself. This is *exactly*
what I was saying. Companies who make money from 'products' would have a
real hard time open sourcing their code. Their main revenue stream would
take a pretty fatal dent.

> I'm sorry: MCPS  ?

Organisation who sorts out royalty payments.

> I'm not so sure. Ron Kuper (?) from Cakewalk/Sonar has been known to 
> lurk here, and he's come across as truly interested in Linux audio 
> activities. Ditto for Charlie Steinberg (though I don't know if he's a 
> lurker or even a member of the list). It's worth noting that both those 
> companies have come far by (along with making a good product) being 
> responsive to their customer base. It's quite possible that they could 
> find productive channels for contributing to open-source projects 
> without competing against themselves. Some time ago I voiced the 
> question "How will Cakewalk et al respond if/when Ardour starts being 
> distributed along with M-Audio and RME boards and makes real progress in 
> the pro-audio world ?". Ron's response was sober and solid, stating that 
> they would respond by trying to make their products even better. These 
> guys have an excellent grasp of market realities in what is indeed a 
> very narrow market, they know how to make smart moves. Consider the 
> success of VST: Steinberg created an open standard (well, open by the 
> standards of the Windows/Mac worlds) and created a thriving community of 
> developers and users. Everyone wins.

I retract my comment. If companies are serious about gaining linux
market share then you are quite right, they would get the communications
channels open.

> It's also worth mentioning the evolving business model for Ardour. Paul 
> has made it clear that certain features will only be added to Ardour if 
> they're paid for, e.g. if you want MIDI capabilities in Ardour you'll 
> get them much faster if you contribute some dinero. I don't know how 
> well this actually working for Paul, but if it does work sufficiently 
> well perhaps it's another aspect of Ardour that will make a little 
> history and serve as a HOWTO for projects of similar scope. My 
> impression has been that Paul has been looking at various ways to 
> generate income from Ardour, it will be very interesting to see how it 
> all works out over the next few years.

I would be VERY interested to know that. 

> Yes, but as in my example of the food co-ops we really ought to strongly 
> encourage a "take & give" philosophy among users. The benefits are 
> self-evident, and there are of course many ways to contribute to 
> open-source projects without being a developer/coder yourself.

Yes, and my comment was pure Devil's Advocate :) Actually, it was
slightly based on the fiasco of RedHat when they created a theme for KDE
and Gnome that were identical, removed all references to KDE (including
the credits) to make a fluid desktop environment. Both parties went
bananas. But the fact is, the licence they used completely permitted
that. If the code was never intended to be used like that then the
licence should have said so. I know all about the community and being
good and returning things, I fully agree with this, but many companies
with big bucks wont. I think it's a lesson in learning exactly what your
licence states before you start. I believe some licences are too slack
and benefit big companies more than the small guy (think BSD and Apple).
If KHTML had been BSD licence too i wonder how much apple would have
contributed back through the development of safari. I don't know. Maybe
they would. Maybe their really nice and good like that. I'm just a bit
cynical and would rather not take the chance of having the community
robbed by some faceless organisation (I told you that sentence you wrote
would be a perfect picture of irony :) ).


> I would probably check them out just due to curiosity and to see what 
> features I'll bug the developers for in Ardour and ecasound... ;)

Hmm.. this makes me think: What if Ardour was so good, it put steinberg
and cakewalk out of business? Would that be a good thing? For musicians,
perhaps? For music program innovation, maybe not. As much as i hate
microsoft, they do know the benefit of spending money on research. And
they reap the benefits of that. But so do we (especially in the areas of
HCI and usability). If that were translated into the music software
industry then perhaps a lack of research would be detrimental to future
features. At the end of the day research must be paid for one way or
another, because that's the economy we live in. Now I don't know the
answers to these questions. It's merely a thought. 

> Even as a "Devil's advocate" post your original was a good spur towards 
> discussion of some interesting topics. Thanks for writing it, sorry for 
> any misapprehension on my part, and I hope we read more from you on this 
> list.

Oh, thanks. I'm sure you're the only one with that sentiment :)

Juan, I wanted to try cheesetracker but it was almost impossible for me
to install. I got the source, and it said i needed a build tool. So i
got the build tool and then that moaned that pkg-config wasn't working
right. I hope less technical people wont be turned off by this. I'll try
again tonight. I'm more of a graphics coder than a dsp coder so i was
going to knock up a "sexy" gui but once i saw the current ui
screenshots, i started wandering where this "bad UI" was. Looks fine to
me!

<offtopic>
Which leads me onto another rant: with todays hard disk sizes, memory
capacities and internet speeds, why do we need to distribute things with
dependencies? Why not statically compile? My recent example of this was
with skaletracker (this is not a flame!!). But i unzipped the file, ran
it and it just worked (Im not sure if it was statically linked with SDL
or not). In it's current form it IS inferior to cheesetracker but people
are going to use what works for them. I think people should distribute
"developer" versions and "user" versions. developer is what we are used
to, user is the statically linked (read no brainer, no options) version.
The amount of times I would have preferred to download a "non-bleeding
edge" version that was statically compiled and took 10 times as long to
download is countless. Anything but dependency hell!!! :)

I hope this isn't seen as a flame towards anyone, it's intended as
constructive criticism in a hope to better the linux experience as this
problem is rife community-wide.
</offtopic>

Cheers, and peace :)

-Lea.