well, i wouldn't read ken's comment as fundamentalist open source
zealotry, but rather as "live and let live" - people who need a wider
selection of plugins and instruments and are willing to pay can always
use what's on the market. but why should open source users bother?
the open source community doesn't have to cater to all needs.
particularly since, in my book, the commercial plugin world is riddled
with dysfunctional chrome and marketing bs - actual innovations are
quite rare. what you can get is ok if you are using plugins as a source
of inspiration, tweaking a knob here and there to get interesting, new
results. if, on the other hand, you know perfectly well what you need
for your mix, then some magic little plugin with dials labelled "depth",
"crunch" or whatever won't help.
you can't sell bs as open source, because everybody can clearly see what
a plugin does, and if it's an hf shelf with some gentle harmonic
distortion, then people want the gui to say so, and not read "vintage
warmth".
While I understand the main message and agree with it, I think you are overgeneralizing.
VST plugin world has enough innovations and the amount of very capable, serious
plugins is actually quite large. Not all of them use the word "Depth" or "Crunch", although
in some cases Depth is not a bad term at all, but even if they do, very often they have
instructions which explain in detail what each parameter actually is.
It is true that there are plugins which are just a joke, but on Linux I can also find several weird
LADSPA plugins, which have parameter names even worth than Depth, something along
the lines of S,Q,T,P1,P2 and some other unhelpful labels and which produce strange noise, but
it really is not representative.
When it comes to VST world, the technical representation will not be in favor of Linux, unfortunately.
I wish it was, but it's not. I can name many excellent plugins, both VST and VSTi, which are both
great functionally and are well marketed.
Perhaps I misunderstood what you want to say, but if you try to convey a message that VST is just
a bunch of cloned technology with good marketing and GUI, I would say you are over simplifying things
enormously.
In fact, a couple of months ago on LAD list I did ask that same question and all you guys who are
developers answered. The question was whether VST stuff is really unique or whether there is not much
innovation, but just copying. I don't remember exactly what everybody said, but I do remember people saying
that there are complex stuff in the VST world that at the moment do not exist on Linux, particularly good
reverb algorithms. Some other complex DSP fields were also mentioned.
So, what I am saying is that VST world is some serious stuff and although there are many free plugins made
with SynthEdit which suck ass, there is a huge number of great VSTs which are not only marketing.