[LAU] Ardour3

[Ken Restivo]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:05:18AM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Philipp ?berbacher
> <hollunder at lavabit.com> wrote:
> 
> > I spare myself criticism regarding cooperation in the past and the
> > increasing tendency to control, but one more thing to think about:
> > 'advertising' A3 features on the one hand and trying to preventing
> > 'casual' users is contradictory.
> 
> to be pedantic, i've taken precisely zero steps to prevent packages
> being created, unless you think that me actually speaking out about it
> can prevent it. i'm a reasonably good software architect, but i'm not
> that powerful :)
> 
> my concern is not really for me or other developers, its for users who
> get a crappy experience and conclude that a tool that *will*
> eventually be useful for them is too buggy for any serious user. i
> can't count the pieces of s/w that i've downloaded, found that it
> crashes or had a serious bug and simply written it off. at some points
> during a program's lifetime, that might be an appropriate reaction.
> but before there has even been an alpha release, i don't think its
> fair to users to suggest to them that there is an easy or "casual" way
> to "try" the program when it is reasonably likely that it doesn't work
> for them.
> 
> the alternative is for us to do development in secret and i don't
> think that this really serves anyone very well.

This is exactly the problem, and it is very fundamental.

Developers can't control the user experience of an open source software package. Full stop. It is not possible. The users, and the distributions, have a lot more say in it.

Unless you close the source, users on Linux *WILL* have varying uncontrollable levels of user experience-- it's the price of openness.

I see that Ardour has a good following of users in the Mac world, where this kind of tight control of the user experience is rampant and was part of Steve Jobs's original closed-system vision in the early 1980s, and perhaps that kind of philosophy is important when dealing with that market. But that attitude doesn't fit in Linux land, although shipping a binary distro-independent package might get somewhere close, who knows.

-ken