[linux-audio-user] why this works now ...

[Erik Steffl]

Lee Revell wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 23:29, Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote:
> 
>>Well, now that I know ecasound's rtnull is not meant for use with the 
>>kind of thing I was trying to do and remembered that you can't add a 
>>chainop to 2 chains at once ... This whole thing works in one ecasound 
>>instance, with or without jack ... I feel really foolish for making all 
>>this noise on the lists all week ... <hangs head in shame>  I'll try to 
>>write up something for the ecasound docs to explain this so others don't 
>>make the same mistake.
> 
> 
> Eh, this is how free software works, the concept of wasting people's
> time doesn't mean a lot.  I spent a month banging my head against the
> emu10k1 ALSA driver trying to figure out why the latency was 10 times
> worse than in windows.  Over a period of weeks I posted 5 or 6 crazy
> theories to alsa-devel, all wrong.  Turns out it was just a stupid bug
> where a bunch of instances of SND_PCM_PERIOD_SIZE needed to be changed
> to SND_PCM_PERIOD_BYTES.  I submitted a patch and now the latency is
> better than on Windows.
> 
> Moral of the story: in free software, the only person whose time you can
> waste is your own, and it's only wasted time if you don't learn
> anything.

   <rant>

   the concept of wasting people's time doesn't mean a lot? that's very 
strange way to put it, considering how the rest of the software world 
works where usually concept of anything doesn't mean a thing, the best 
you can hope that you are allowed to waste lot of money. The major 
difference between open/free software and proprietary is that with 
proprietary software you are mostly SOL (and that includes significant 
number of cases when you pay pretty huge amounts of money for support 
and maintenance).

   free/open software: you can look or make somebody else to look at the 
problem and possibly solve it

   proprietary software: big FU! (if there's a bug in windows driver do 
I have a real chance to go and fix it or at least investigate the details)

   and you call that a disregard of people's time... just because you 
received and almost unimaginable gift of having ability to access the 
internals of everything... and you use it:-)

   I think it makes a lot more sense to judge it in the context of the 
real world except of simply stating - I spent some time ergo they don't 
care about my time.

   just because it's popular among journalists doesn't mean it should be 
repeated.

   </rant>


	erik