[Ardour-Dev] Licensing and enforced payments

[Patrick Shirkey]

Hi,

As the original thread is attempting to be a location for ideas to be 
posted and discussion is suggested to take place on a separate thread 
lets start up this discussion here:

8: Paid for SVN
9: Paid License to: disable crippled interface, Get access to more 
features, Disable RSS ticker

+++++++++
Negatives:

Many Linux people feel very strongly that any of the above is tantamount 
to signing your name in the blood of your fist born with the Devil.

Positives:

People who would otherwise completely neglect to contribute to Ardour 
(free loaders) will be more likely to pay money if they are forced to.

+++++++++

- Paul has already declared on numerous occasions over the past 12 years 
or so of development that Ardour is GPL and will always be GPL. We have 
no reason to believe he would change that.

- A fork of Ardour wouldn't go very far without the main man Paul so if 
anyone wanted to fork Ardour and maintain any updates just because a 
couple of paid for addons that could be disabled at compile time or with 
a simple config setting were added they would really be making extra 
work for themselves.

IMO, paying for SVN access is a last resort if all the other options fail.

IMO, some kind of paid license to disable or enable a certain feature to 
get people who would otherwise not contribute to Ardour is a reasonable 
option.

- Some will call it cripple ware and some will call it "added value 
professional functionality".
- Some people want to pay for additional features. Giving them the 
option is simply another way to get them to give some cash.
- Many people will not contribute unless they are specifically told to.
- Many people think that unless they are asked to pay for something it 
has no real value.
- Many people think that the owner or creator doesn't value the product 
if they don't specifically ask for money before handing over the goods. 
If they receive a product tin full without being asked to pay for it 
that in turn makes people feel they shouldn't value the product either.
- If we add a License fee for people who want to pay a license fee then 
we are making those people feel valued.
- Many of the future users of Ardour (as in the net book hordes who are 
about to descend) will expect to have some kind of license fee. If we 
don't give them a way to give money then we are missing out on a huge 
market.
- Why do we spend so much effort on making the best software that we can 
but are unwilling to use our skills to get people to pay us for the 
effort by maximizing the options for people to part with their cash?





Cheers.



-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.