est@hyperreal.org writes:

Hey, pd People, :)

Having played with pd a bit, I feel some urges to hack on it. :)

What is the possibility of getting GPLed patches into the main distribution? I'm a struggling consultant and the idea of someone making money off my volunteer work (by taking pd closed via the Berkeley-style license) is unacceptable to me.

Quote from LICENCE.txt:

<quote>

Modifications to this software may be copyrighted by their authors and need not follow the licensing terms described here, provided that the new terms are clearly indicated on the first page of each file where they apply.

<\quote>

This means, your changes have to be in separate files. I guess this is ok, as you probably don't want to protect simple bug fixes.

If you want to change, rewrite bigger parts of pd, best thing is to keep them as separate as possible from the main distribution.

The best way to hack on pd is to write externals, which means you can distribute your code with any license you want to.

What exactly is your concern about pd's license ? Is it too open ?

Guenter, what's your perspective on such questions?

I basically want opensource modular synthesis. The three alternatives I see are classic csound (not really an option since commercial use of the software is forbidden), pd and quasimodo (GPLed). Am I missing any other major alternatives?

This depends on other factors too (Do you want to have realtime synthesis ?). The drawback of pd is, as I have mentioned before, the lack of the possibility of dynamic instrument instantiation. This is rather easy in Csound. But then Csound can not guaranty that the patch is really runable in realtime if too many voices are instantiated. Effect processing and the like is straight forward to implement in pd. Actually pd breaks with the traditional "instrument and score" view, most composers are used to, therefore being very suitable for experimental sound synthesis.

Other software synthesis packages are CLM and CMIX, XAOS and Perry Cooks Synthesis toolkit, which are all Open Source.

Perry Cooks toolkit features some nice instruments, requires C++ programming. I'm not too familiar with Cmix, XOAS I don't know, and CLM's realtime support is rather limited (as I recall).

Pd has this nice "Try and Error" programming approach, which, IMO made Max that famous.

Guenter