23 Jan
2003
23 Jan
'03
12:54 p.m.
[2] Design. This will be open to MMA members only. If
you want the legal
protection that the MMA provides, and you want somebody else to pay for
"stewardship" of the spec, then it's worth joining. Even some open-source
developers sell products, and those who do will recoup their cost after
selling a very small number of units.
i want to echo what ron has written here.
even just from a documentation angle: the specs for any unified plugin
API will be no small document. this document needs to be printed
(because some people will want it like that rather than as a PDF
file), it needs to be hosted, it needs errata management,
etc. etc. etc. to date, volunteer efforts have not been particularly
successful even on just the maintainance side of this, and its hard to
see how it would work for the stuff that actually needs money. more
importantly, with something as widely adopted as we would hope this
would be, its critical to have a reference source for the spec. take a
look at the myriad of documents on MIDI, RIFF/WAV and so forth: which
one is *the* spec?
IMO the *worst* possible scenario is that the
commercial companies (many of
whom are a one man show) decide that they want to join the MMA, while a
sizeable group of others decide to persue a parallel effort. That gives us
2 standards, and nobody wins.
fully echoed. i hope that other LAD members feel similarly.
--p