[linux-audio-user] Finale for Linux

[Chris Pickett]

RickTaylor at Speakeasy.Net wrote:
> On 11-Jul-2004 Chris Pickett wrote:
> }  Hi Rick,
> }  
> }  Sorry for the delay responding.  Since Thursday, have seen Ibrahim 
> }  Ferrer, Dianne Reeves, Carol Welsman, Peter Cincotti, Oliver Jones, and 
> }  Oscar Peterson at the Montreal Jazz Festival.  CW was okay, the rest 
> }  were amazing!
> 
>  I'm not really a fan of modern-day jazz {prefering noise, electronic bleeps,
> concrete, spacey stuff {TD, Jarre, etc..}, experimental stuff, and rock {Maybe
> a bit of classical} I really prefer *old* school jazz. I will not listen to
> fusion.} Most of those people elude me.

Ibrahim Ferrer is a singer as part of the (defunct?) Buena Vista Social 
Club and they were playing cuban jazz.  Dianne Reeves sings and her 
biggest inspiration is Sarah Vaughan.  Peter Cincotti is this 
20-year-old prodigy who sings and plays songs by the old crooners, and 
writes some new things in an old style as well.  Oliver Jones and Oscar 
Peterson are two of Canada's finest and oldest jazz pianists, and it was 
pure bliss when they brought two pianos on stage for two final encores. 
  Definitely old school!  (we also saw Gary Burton (vibraphone) and 
Chick Corea (piano), but that was prior to Thursday)

>  This would be the one major problem I have with "open source" and to some
> extent with the GPL. In practice it seems to me that, more often than not, one
> doesn't really have a choice.
> 
>  An example that's pretty easy would be linux audio... copyrighted stuff seems
> to pretty much excluded. If that's the case... I don't see any future at all
> for this movement. Folk that get excluded are going to walk away... there's
> going to be all sorts of {more} bad blood and I, frankly, just don't see it
> going anywhere. This whole thing depends on much cooperation. There needs to be
> a way to reconcile things... I think shareware fits that need fairly well. 
>
>  {Exclusionary anything just sucks.}
> 
>  To me... the "Linux Audio Developers" are the couple thousand{s} or so folk
> that have contributed to this since the beginning. Much of that software is
> copyrighted. I think those folk deserve to be recognized and included and
> should be able to charge for their stuff if that's the way they choose to live
> their life.

Just a clarification: everything is copyrighted, unless it is explicitly 
released into the public domain.  That's why these licenses work.

The truncated paragraph said:

"However, non-free software companies often want to create vendor
lock-in, and they've shown a good way to do this is to decrease
interoperability between programs and flexibility in the system.  They
allow for only one box per program, and furthermore make one subscribe
to their whole subsystem of boxes to get something usable.  It's like
when Lego started making wall pieces instead of just individual blocks
to build them."

I realize the Lego analogy is a little broken.

Anyway, at the end of the day, if Linux Audio started to need non-free 
stuff to be good, I'd just buy a Mac.  For me, the core of what makes 
the whole thing tick and even worth using at all (ignoring the wonderful 
unix-y benefits that Macs now have too) is that it's free.  I think the 
reaction, "Everyone else is releasing free stuff, you can bloody well 
release free stuff too!" isn't entirely unjustified.  As for music 
shareware developers, frankly I think they'd have a better time writing 
for OS X anyway, as a real shareware community actually exists.

Cheers,
Chris