[LAU] bitwig announcement

Renato rennabh at gmail.com
Sun Jan 15 17:36:39 UTC 2012


On Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:11:13 +0100
Jeremy Jongepier <jeremy at autostatic.com> wrote:

> And about the scary part, news like this brings up questions for me. 
> What kind of users will it attract? How many users will switch and
> drop software like Ardour and Qtractor? The Linux audio is a very
> small niche and even though it's a very hypothetical thought,
> software like Bitwig could damage the Linux audio ecosystem.

It seems an unjustified fear to me this - as I see it in the bazaar way
of making things, diversity and change is allways something to strive
for. Sure, propietary software doesn't really stay in the bazaar, but
near to it. It doesn't directly give back to the community through
source code, but still it brings more users to approach the linux audio
environment.

I personally like using free software - not for a philosophical stance,
but because it suits me better. I like to be able to talk directly to
the devs, see a widespread collaboration, and sometimes be competent
enough to give a hand. 
In particulare I like very much the linux audio environment:
you can do very very particular stuff that you can't with propietary
software (because of course for max revenue they target main stream
music) and I love this flexibility. 

I don't know if I'll be using bitwig beyond some toying with it (I
certainly won't even touch it if it doesn't support JACK ;) ), but I
wouldn't see anything bad with people starting to use it. It's not like
if a mass of people starts using bitwig I won't be able to use seq24,
qtractor, freewheeling etc.; I'll keep using those, and I know there
are many passionate users on this list who will do the same, and more
will come - not because they can't afford mixbus or bitwig, but because
they simply like better free software.

So IMHO our small niche totally won't be blasted away: there are too
many passionate people in it, both dev and users, who have invested
their free time in this (i.e. they really care about it). 

best wishes,
renato


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