Ardour is a good example of a professional tool, because it supports
professional audio hardware,
ah ah ah. Pd supports professional audio hardware, I've been working for
years with my hammerfall card.
I've tried already some times to work with ardour, and it always failed me
(except this last version, it's more stable). I guess that could be a
(very simple) definition of "professional": it does what it's supposed to
do. Which I almost never had a problem with pd, and had lots of times with
ardour.
strange, I just heard from a friend that works in audio production that
ardour *isn't* a professional program, because it's not good (he uses
nuendo). he pointed out that they had the words "professional" in their
website before, and it's not there anymore.
also strange, I remember of you mentioning a software with documentation
as professional (or am I wrong?). Ardour has less documentation than Pd,
and they *do* make money to support their developer(s), at least 4,5K$ a
month.
the question about pd is biased because it does support most kind of
hardware but the user still have to build his own interface, so, professionalism doesn't come from pd only but
from the immixtion of the tool and the user.
bias: "inclination towards something; predisposition, partiality,
prejudice, preference, predilection" (wiktionary). Maybe that's not the
word you're looking for.
I guess if pd lets the user do his work, then it's professional enough.
Execpt some externals that are buggy, and have no documentation, and
therefore are unusable. That's unprofessional, to release such kind of
code.
if by "professional" you mean "it's sold and people make profit from it", then in today's world it's such a worthy definition as to say "the website of this software is blue, therefore it's a good website".
sinceramente
?