[LAU] A year of Linux Audio revisited - would like to know your oppinion

[david]

Sebastian Tschöpel wrote:
> Hi Jan,
> 
>> 1) the
>> ability to directly ask the author(s) for a feature or bug fix and ....
> 
> Well, i thought of that, too. But that was more a general open-source 
> issue to me and not directly connected with making music.

But it applies. I'm a musician, at least to a degree. Being able to 
directly ask the developer for some feature that I think would be really 
cool and just what I need to use - and having a chance of actually 
getting it without having to wait wait wait while Big Corporate Company 
gets around to implementing it and THEN most likely charges me a big 
upgrade fee to get it - makes me quite happy.

>> 2) The "company"
>> can go out of business and the tool won't be unsupported (unless
>  > absolutely no one was using it).  Even in that case, if you have some
>  > money, you could probably hire someone to do some work on it.
> 
> Of course you could but again: I tried to focus on what a musician would 
> think:
> He won't try to proceed with the development of a tool when the project 
> is shut
> down. At least not the musicians i know. They want to produce music as easy
> as possible :)

Musicians don't care if the maker of their software disappears or not. 
If they really like the tool, they'll continue using it. If they decide 
to replace it with something else later on, they'll do that.

But the open-source project doesn't necessarily shutdown. Someone else 
interested, (and usually there are, I think there are pretty few 
moribund open source projects), takes it over and continues, expands, or 
even massively improves it. Or just merges it into something better.

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community