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

[Paul Davis]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Ray Rashif <schivmeister at gmail.com> wrote:
> I couldn't structure the last paragraph properly. In fact, as I see it now
> it doesn't even make sense. What I meant was this:
>
> Users see that Ardour is charging for vestige.
> Users see that the other projects are not charging for vestige.
> Users wonder "why is Ardour charging?"

no, we would not be charging for vestige.
we would be charging for prebuilt binaries that have particular
features. the question is already "why is ardour charging?" and the
answer is that ardour doesn't get enough financial support from other
avenues to make it possible for even 1 developer to work on the
program full time. i believe that this is a bare minimum requirement
for the project to keep moving forward with enough vigor to justify
people's long term use of the software.

anyway, i would forget it. supporting VST plugins on linux is still
sufficiently hassle-full and, more importantly, almost unsupportable
in any meaningful way ("wah! i tried using Foomatic Exploder and
ardour crashed") that i cannot imagine charging people for this kind
of functionality.

>
> Take a look at eLive. There is a mandatory donation needed for anyone to
> download the ISO. And I think it's working. Can it be done in a similar
> fashion eg. donate to download the source?

that can be done but it sets up a pressure point that might stimulate
someone to set up a redistribution site without the financial
requirement. this happened with redhat early on, for example. that
would be much, much worse, i think. ardour.org needs to be the place
you get ardour (linux distros notwithstanding, for now).