Hi all, just a few cents:
- It's incredibly great that PD itself is free and it should be free as in
freedom as long as Miller wants it to be that way. We all know about the benefits of that fact.
- Personally, i'll have to find a way to dedicate my time to performing
music and developing for real-time systems AND make my living. That currently involves a trade-off between programming shitty commercial stuff for a lot of money and programming interesting musical stuff for no money.
- Consequently, i set up PayPal buttons on my website so that people can
steer me from the bad side to the good side. I'm very grateful about the donations of the two persons (one Max, one PD) that made use of it in the last months. These individuals shall have extra personal support whenever they need it.
- 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.
- Considering my experiences of the last years, there were tons of bug
reports (which is great!) but no suggested patches to the source code, so i don't see a real point (apart from a political attitude) to publish the source. I'll yet have to find a way to support the various linux distributions, but it should be doable with minor restrictions. The open-source idea is great but has to be balanced with the facts of life, which involve suitable ideas being stolen and commercially used by others.
- Earning a bit of money from that will give me a lot of further motivation
to contribute to the PD kernel and other free stuff as well. Needless to say that there will be discounts for my stuff for various kinds of personal or institutional circumstances.
- I'm live performing a lot (60 concerts last year) so i want to rely on a
stable system - i'm not so much interested in academic discussions. Comparing the quality level between Max and its 3rd party stuff and PD with extensions leaves no choice open. I'd rather pay a few bucks and save my nerves rather than having a shitty interface along with clicks, pops and beer stains. If some money were involved to back the PD developers this would certainly change for the better.
good gain! Thomas
----- Original Message ----- From: "Frank Barknecht" fbar@footils.org To: "pd-list" pd-list@iem.kug.ac.at Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2004 12:11 PM Subject: Re: [PD] Re: [PD-dev] SourceForge "Donations"
Hallo, Olaf Matthes hat gesagt: // Olaf Matthes wrote:
That's a good point. I have some code (i.e. externals) I don't want to give away for free (because it took so much time to code them), but the impression about the average Pd user one gets when reading the mailing list suggest that selling closed-source Pd externals is something one would get 'killed' for. My solution was to switch to Max/MSP. There seems to be a completely different attitute towards open-source among Max/MSP users. Nobody cries "where is the source code?" in case I release an external without sources and nobody complains when I decide to sell my stuff instead of giving it away for free.
I just want to point out that there are two different "free"s involved: On is free as in beer, the other free as in freedom. Max/MSP users - Reaktor users seem to be even worse - often don't want this freedom to look at and change the source. They feel that they don't need it, and in fact they do not need it. Thus they are less inclined if at all to demand it. Many Reaktor users even buy patches, go figure!
But at least in the Windows world, it is certain, that a *lot* of users just want the "free" as in beer. There are hundreds or thousands of cracked copies of Reaktor, Live, Cubase and similar tools installed. When I saw Robert Henke from Ableton explain "Live" in a presentation, he was asking the audience to at least look for a crack, that works, because a bad crack leading to crashes would have a bad impact even on Ableton's image: "I know you do this, but make sure you do it right."
I just don't want to be a part of this habit. This simply is another world I don't want to be involved in (anymore). This might also explain your impression of getting 'killed'. Doing closed source software is not part of this world, it's like: "On December 3rd 2001, he tragically left our world".
ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__
PD-list mailing list PD-list@iem.at http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list