I'm sorry my French isn't good enough to make an accurate reply in
that language...
> Agnula won't be present but it is possible that there will
> be a linuxaudio.org booth.
I presume you mean Frankfurt Musikmesse, taking place at the end of
this month:
http://musik.messefrankfurt.com/global/en/home.html
I've had another enquiry about linuxaudio.org presence there, but so
far none of the members have said that they will be attending.
Perhaps we can be involved next year, or at the events in Russia and
China.
> This consortium is more adapted to
> discuss with Creamware.
I agree, but I don't personally have any contacts with the company. I
see there has been some recent activity on alsa-devel which sounds
very relevant:
http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg11861.html
Cheers
Daniel James
Director
http://linuxaudio.org
Hello all,
I've had an enquiry about linuxaudio.org participation in the
Frankfurt Musikmesse, taking place at the end of this month:
http://musik.messefrankfurt.com/global/en/home.html
If anyone is planning to be there, please let me know and I will put
you in touch with our contact. It's a little late to organise a stand
this year I guess, but I notice there are now Musikmesse events in
Russia and China...
Cheers
Daniel
> I am committing myself to helping out on the linuxaudio.org stand
> within the not-for-profit '.org village' at Linux User Expo, I
> would like to be there for the whole thing, definitely the 21st, if
> that's what you need.
That would be very helpful - thanks! Steve Harris has offered to do
the 20th, and I'll be doing the 21st. Steve, could you bring your
tube of posters again? If the Rosegarden lot have any more of those
A6 flyers we could give those out too.
> I've not done this sort of thing before, as I mentioned. I assume
> it's mostly a case of being there and talking to people about
> making music on Linux (?)
Absolutely - at this stage, some people don't believe that it's
actually possible to make and record music on Linux-based systems, so
to put the proof in front of people is really valuable. I do
understand people's scepticism, because there's been a lot of
vaporware in the past and Linux audio sounds too good to be true...
> My immediate thought is that it would be nice for me to have an
> Agnula system to play with & show people
I took an old Toshiba laptop with me to Sounds Expo, running Demudi
1.1.0. I was able to run Hydrogen and JACK Rack with a flanger plugin
together without xruns, which was not bad considering it is only a
Pentium II 300 MHz.
Cheers
Daniel
Hello all,
Is there anyone (other than the Rosegarden project - already listed)
who would be interested in helping out on a linuxaudio.org stand
within the not-for-profit '.org village' at Linux User Expo in
London, April 20-21?
http://www.linuxexpo.org.uk/
I'm planning to be there anyway, but I'll probably be working on
another stand or in the conference for at least some of the time. The
BBC R&D department has expressed interest in having a presence there
too, so perhaps we can form a cluster of multimedia-related stands
with the Rosegarden lot.
Cheers
Daniel James
Director
http://linuxaudio.org
> Perhaps instead of rotating the hardware, we could set up a
> scheme whereby one developer or site 'X' agrees to be the
> maintainer of support for device 'Y', and other developers who
> want to test their software on 'Y' have to work with 'X'. That
> way, 'X' gets the benefit of having the loan hardware on-site,
> but also has the responsibility to work with the community on
> support for it.
This is completely wrong. I would never advise open-source developers to borrow a device in order to get a job done
for free and additionally have responsibilities(such as returning the hw and responsibility to work with the community on
support for it). This should be a responsibility of the company that manufactures that device.
Obsequiousness is not what's going to help us.
Curently, as very few companies provide open source drivers for their hw unfortunately,
the company can either donate a device or provide specs if that developer already bought their device.
If you already own a device (whether donated or not) it's in your personal interest to get the driver done.
If you're not a developer capable of coding a driver, you can either
a) pay someone to get it done
b) pester him and pray that he will accept ;)
In that case you would lend him your own hw.
That means there's no need to talk about responsibility. It just isn't how opensource works.
We should be advising people to buy hw which is already supported.
Regarding the 'Linux Audio' conference announcement on linuxaudio.org:
Daniel, AFAIK it's Linux Audio Developers ZKM conference, but sounds like it's now a linuxaudio.org conference.
To quote you from jan-12-2004 "Secondly, as important as the ZKM conference is, it
has no official status." Well now it sounds it has got an official
status. But it sounds more like it's now a linuxaudio.org conference
more than a LAD conference. If you view linuxaudio.org as a separate
project, i think it's fair to call things by their right names and not
usurp an event for your own project.
On Tuesday 03 February 2004 08:14, Richard Bown wrote:
> > You simply haven't thoroughly read my messages.
> Tell you what Marek. Why don't we play a game of who can keep quiet the
> longest? You start.
I win. ;)
Marek
> > Before talking about an individual developer's
> > "responsibility" to do free work for a hardware company, we should
> > be talking about that developer's worth to the company.
> > Perhaps - but let me put it like this. The professional Linux audio
> market is currently so small as to be insignificant to a hardware
> company. We currently rely on good will to get any loan hardware or
> specifications.
> while i may agree with the general gist of marek's first objection, it
> seems to me he is (again) shooting the messenger here.
And you're again insulting me publicly, although i woudln't say a word
if you didn't know about my intentions long ago.
> it is certainly more desirable to have vendors supply drivers or
> development samples of hardware without strings attached. but the fact is,
> many don't.
That doesn't mean we should encourage *loans* for the purpose of doing a driver which should be done by companies.
"You're going to do the driver for us, return the hw in a perfect condition and as soon as possible."
They deserve a lot more than be treated like that by companies.
As i said before, all we can do right now is:
1. advise people to buy hw which already is supported. nice advertising btw.
2. require donations and specs for hw which isn't available
3. widen the userbase considerably, there's lots of tools and mechanisms that would help us to achieve that.
> if i understood daniel's intent correctly, he is trying to provide a
> *mechanism* for how hardware loans and/or donations should be handled.
> marek is talking about *policy*. in good unix tradition, those should
> kept separate.
Well i was talking about the *purpose* of hw loans, to be clear enough.
But i'd like to know how you distinguish a policy from a mechanism in this case, Joern.
Marek
> That is not an insult.
> If you would like your agruments to be considered than do not bury >
them in such nonsense.
http://eca.cx/lad/2004/02/0078.html
I suggested linuxaudio.org for LA* mailing lists and an updated site
with news in July 2003. I suggested it to Joern because he's the admin
of those lists. No answer until january -
http://eca.cx/lad/2004/01/0354.html
I think i have a *very good* reason to think that he's insulting me.
"he's (again) shooting the messenger" Marek
Daniels msgs:
<snip>
> I think that's up to the developer to decide.
I'm not saying it isn't.
> The situation at the
> moment is that many libre audio software developers don't even have
> access to good quality or up to date hardware.
Define access.
> Perhaps - but let me put it like this. The professional Linux audio
> market is currently so small as to be insignificant to a hardware
> company. We currently rely on good will to get any loan hardware or
> specifications.
What is a professional Linux audio market?
Is it the small linuxaudio userbase(both consumer users and professionals)?
Define linux audio market.
Yes we rely on good will, but sucking up won't help us any further,
it's only going to make things worse. The key here is to make the userbase wider.
<snip>
> With the consequence that hardware support is still patchy.
Not at all. Lots of pro-grade audio cards have excellent drivers and support.
Besides, how is a loan going to improve the situation?
User: "i found a bug in driver X"
Developer:"Sorry, we don't have the hardware anymore"
To suggest or support a hw loan is highly irresponsible.
Let's look at the responsibilities:
1. responsibilities of a developer towards a company – to _return_ the
hardware:
a)they might require that you return it in the same condition with
respect to regular wear and tear, which is very vague
b)loan period – for how long can a developer keep a hardware?
> Besides, the responsibility I was talking about was the responsibility
> of an individual to work with the community in return for having
> primary access to the hardware.
2. responsibilities of a developer towards the community:
a developer can only work with people which have access to the same
hardware. Those can be developers or users testing the driver and
reporting. That means that more people need to have access to the same
hardware. Besides, not sure what the responsibility should be – if a
developer doesn't accept a patch, are you suggesting a "process of
arbitration overseen by the Linuxaudio.org Management Board" in order to
determine whether he was acting irresponsibly and the hardware should be
taken away from him or not?
The main point is, however, the fact that the *ALSA team* should
negotiate and request:
* specs if a certain hardware is available to them
* both specs and hardware donation if a certain hardware isn’t available
but popular and requested by users
I have been struggling to get specs for a certain hw, the company(a huge
music industry player btw, which i'm not going to name here but Steve
knows ;) decided after 1,5 years of searching for the right people and
convincing them that it would be ok to provide the requested specs(I've
been in contact with their R&D department). However, they required an
ALSA member to confirm that the specs would be used for coding an ALSA
driver. Jaroslav has helped us and confirmed that. It was ~2 years ago.
The moral of this short story is that ALSA has been acknowledged by that
company 2 years ago as an official source for audio drivers. That was
before ALSA was included in 2.6 which makes this much more significant.
ALSA project leaders or contributors can be already accepted as a
guarantee, they're no anonymous persons which will sell donated hw on
ebay.
> I think donors are looking for some responsibility from the community,
> which seems fair enough to me.
<snip>
> If a particular company wants to donate hardware worth thousands of
> dollars to a libre software developer, they won't expect it to be
> lost, damaged or sold on eBay.
They don't have to. See above(ALSA).
> I think we need to move beyond pure personal interest - to me, Linux
> audio isn't a hobby.
Unless you're running a company or being employed by one, it's a hobby,
no matter how much you want linuxaudio to succeed.
I wasn't talking about pure personal interest, read on...
> I think we have very different ideas about how the community works.
> Many developers do take their responsibilities very seriously,
> including device driver maintainers.
If you have a piece of hw lying around and you know you're able to
develop a driver for it, and given that you've got enough time and are
not lazy enough, you're going to do it so that you can use the hw
afterwards.
My 'personal interest' wasn't about open-source developers being pure
egoists that just don't care. Not at all. They wouldn't even opensource
their hard work if it was like that.
> So what happens when the cards we now recommend go out of production?
They're all 24/96 which is going to stay with us for a while.
> What about Firewire devices?
IIRC somebody was already working on support for them.
msg from Richard:
> But that's the manufacturer's fault - not ours. And use of the words
> "ours"
> and "we" here has to be under advisement it seems - some people want free
> toys to play with, some people want to be taken seriously in a business
> context and you can't apply a single loan policy to both camps.
I can see only one case where a loan would be appropriate:
a Linux Audio company developing an open-source Linux Audio project and
providing services - one of its clients has a certain type of hardware
which he needs support for. The Linux Audio company would borrow the
hardware from the manufacturer and get the needed specs in order to
develop, test out and finetune the driver.
Regarding the ZKM LAD conference.
Everybody remembers that endless thread on LAD and on this list.
About the usage of the term 'Linuxaudio' and the domainname.
I was suggesting to use that term for everything we have, that's the LA*
lists, the LAD site, events and so on and so forth.
While Daniel was claiming that linuxaudio.org is a different project.
If it is, it means that 'Linuxaudio' is different from 'Linux audio
developer' thus the conference should be called by the right name.
If the organisers of the event change the ZKM site and the LAD site to
reflect the change of name of that event to Linux Audio, only then
should it be called a Linux Audio conference. We should respect the
name, it's very likely that they had a reason to name it like that.
BTW i'm all for changing the name, that's why i was suggesting to have
linuxaudio.org pointing at the LA* lists and provide information about
events, sw and community news etc.
But it's up to Frank and Matthias to decide. Not you Daniel, not anyone
of us.
Marek
> Marek: just make a small effort to keep the discussion somehow
> 'clean'
> from subjective (sym|anti)pathies
I'm sorry these lines should be addressed to somebody else.
After being called a troll several times,
after reading several msgs such as:
"SO WHAT?????"
"i certainly do not want to face a stupid public tribunal such as this in
return for my efforts."
"i think spamming my inbox with greater frequency than the MyDoom
virus, and with less purpose, is trolling."
"don't preach freedom and deny others their freedom of choice. we've
had enough of this bigotry lately."
"it tends to attract folks with little to say and too much
time on their hands."
"marek, i must say you are getting on my nerves. people are trying to
get something done here."
"stop bickering now"
"subtlety has totally failed to work so far. i'm offended too by your postings,
too, and i'm really considering to filter your address."
"Sorry, but I will ignore your mails in the future."
"If you would like your agruments to be considered than do not bury them in such
nonsense."
"Tell you what Marek. Why don't we play a game of who can keep quiet the
longest? You start."
Fair enough.
It's time to start learning from your own mistakes guys. My lines were not worth the effort. Good luck.
