[LAU] Payment In Kind Experiment

Chris Cannam wrote: IMHO this remark gets to the heart of the problem. As a human being we have limited resources. I personally have to settle with one head, 2 fingers and 24hrs in a day. The fact that humans also have to eat, and that food is seldom available 'for free' makes that some part of our resources are allocated to surviving. Oh, and having 'a life' also consumes an astonishing amount of these resources. There is no way around the fact that one has to eat, and that that doesn't go well with writing free software in the 'free beer' interpretation. Which seems to be the main reason why people turn to Linux. I've done a quick check on the cheapest offer from Cakewalk (Project 5) that might have all functionality that came up in this thread, and it is 100euro here. If all Rosegarden users were to pay Chris 100euro, I think Rosegarden would have more features than 'Project 5', or maybe even Sonar. The catch 22 seems to be that we currently attract a lot of 'free beer' attention. But in order to get really professional software, you need time, and time = money. So in order for the programs to become more professional, we need people that are willing to pay for them. Which we don't seem to have. You could think of it this way: suppose you have a Linux tool that has 20% of the functionality of an the equivalent Win/Mac tool, you could argue that it's worth 20% of the money. Now add all tools you use on Linux and try to estimate this '20%' value of your software collection. IMHO that's what you would have to be prepared to pay. Of course I know that this is a rude extrapolation, and that 20% of the functionality usually doesn't get you anywhere. But to be honest, I think most of the tools are more near 80% of the 'competing software's functionality. To give you another idea, from my personal pet project (FFADO): we are registered on the ohloh site (http://www.ohloh.net/projects/8040?p=FFADO), and one of the things they do is scan your code repository and use some industry standard way of value-ing the code (COCOMO). In the FFADO case they end up with a value develop the code, it would cost you 1M$. But hey, pick me, I'll do it 'for free'... Rosegarden is also present on ohloh, and is valued more than $2M. I admit that these numbers are large extrapolations and have limited applicability, but they do provide some reference. The only project that seems to be able to break this circle is Ardour. I'd say that that is due to the fact that Paul didn't have to worry about his survival for the time it took to bring Ardour to a critical level. I.e. a level that was high enough for people to start paying for Ardour as soon as Paul's self-funding approached it's limits. For myself I can say that I'm spending an incredible amount of time and energy into coding open source, and that there is not that much in return. Well, there is the respect from fellow coders, gratitude from users, even free hardware (lucky me). But that doesn't pay the bills. So I have to go out and spend time at 'something that someone actually pays for'. And hence it takes 3 years to reach the functionality that comes 'out of the box' on another OS. If I would be sure I can earn a decent living with writing 'free' software, I would seriously consider it. But alas... Note that this is not really a reaction to the original blog giving an overview of the current Linux audio status, but more an attempt at expressing my view on why this is as it is, and why it's IMHO not very likely to change soon. It's like the Ableton guy said at LAC07: "I'm pretty happy with the we-sell-shrinkwrapped-boxed-software model, and I don't see a reason to change that.". Read: "why would we give it away if people seem to be willing to pay for it?". 2 cents for discussion, Pieter Palmers