Personally, I find:
"You can edit the amount in the box below to any amount you wish, If you are downloading a ready-to-run version, and choose to pay nothing, you will get one that is missing some handy functionality. Continuing development, bug fixes and support can only happen if there is money to support those activities. Please become one of the many downloaders who help support the future of Ardour! "
.. to be a bit cryptic.
So, from my viewpoint it's open for interpretation, until someone proves there is in fact a difference between a non-paid and a paid version of a download intended for Mac. As for Linux, there is no "ready-to-run version" on their site, so I would assume that is not a part of the deal anyway. Also, the source can be compiled on any system, even mac.
The point of the fact is that the program is still in larger parts GPL (the parts written by Ardour), which means it belongs to the public, so even one paid download would still become free as soon as the next person made it available to be downloaded for free.
On 03/18/2011 02:24 PM, Pierre Massat wrote:
"You can edit the amount in the box below to *any* amount you wish, If you are downloading a ready-to-run version, and choose to pay nothing, you will get one that is missing some handy functionality."
(from their website, Download page).
Pierre
2011/3/18 ailo ailo.at@gmail.com
On 03/18/2011 01:39 PM, Pierre Massat wrote:
They're saying that some functionalities are missing if you don't pay.
No functionalities are missing to my knowledge. '
The reason to why there are different licenses is because different people have contributed, as is usually the case with any big open source project. Just look at the Linux kernel. That is a monstrous project, involving all kinds of licenses.
To my knowledge, Ardour is not only partly freely available. It's fully freely available. It is almost purely, a GPL based project, like most GNU / Linux open source projects.
If you are interested in investigating the meaning of the licenses, I suggest you download the full source of Ardour. Then look up each license for each bit of code to see what they mean.
-- ailo