[Ardour-Dev] Payed downloads for Ardourvst on GNU/Linux

[Paul Davis]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Ray Rashif <schivmeister at gmail.com> wrote:
> While I love the idea, I don't see how it's going to be effective unless
> Ardour officially offers binaries of every different distribution.

Well, Mozilla manages to do this with a single binary, although most
users get a version from their distribution. It is technically a
rather challenging, but it can be done. I will spend a little time
investigating this next week. It would also help clean up the broken
builds that some distros have made available and thus negatively
affected ardour's reputation on their platform.

> Another reason why this will not work for us is because the vestige header
> is open-source. As such, if Ardour asks for a mandatory one-time donation to
> release a binary which was compiled against vestige, then all other similar
> projects (LMMS, Qtractor, Rosegarden) will have to follow suit. Now you tell
> me - will it be ethical?

As the FSF goes to great lengths to point out, nothing in the GPL
prevents charging money for the distribution of software. The problem
is that since anyone you distribute to is free to re-distribute, you
have to create a compelling case why anyone should pay *you*.

If a binary release for linux was to happen (it may be technically
infeasible), there is nothing that would require any other project
that uses libsndfile, libsamplerate, the vestige header or any other
GPL'ed component that Ardour uses, to follow suit.

--p