Hallo, Thomas Grill hat gesagt: // Thomas Grill wrote:
- Given that, 100$ within 5 months can't pay my rent, so i'll have to charge
some money for upcoming developments. None of the current packages will be involved, including flext, but some large future packages will. Clearly, these will have functionality that none of the currently published PD-related stuff has, otherwise it won't make any sense.
You certainly have a point here. (I also bothered you with bug reports and never paid anything.) It is very difficult to make money as developer of free software if the business model is based on selling this software. One of the most popular examples is Paul Davis, author of Ardour and Jack. He devoted about 5 years solely to developing Ardour and financed this from his own money which he once made as one of the founding developers of Amazon.com. This money is more or less gone now, so Paul also is looking for a way to squeeze some money out of the Ardour project and currently he is considering selling in-depth documentation. He probably cannot sell Ardour anymore, because several other developers wrote code for it as well.
I also don't have a good answer.
Personally I think, that more public funding should go into open source software. Like Miller probably developing Pd as part of his university appointment or like the EU is paying for the AGNULA project. Free Software is in the public interest.
This also is a conflict between "sciences" and "economy". If there were only commercial software developers than a lot of projects wouldn't exist, the same goes for science: there are a lot of things which wouldn't be a topic of research because their economic value is small or non-existant. Like some kinds of music can only survive because of public funding (also indirect through things like public radio stations giving composers of experimental music a job.)
ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__