[Ardour-Dev] Licensing and enforced payments

[Thomas Vecchione]

To be honest, we have already beaten this to death in the original thread,
so I won't rehash the debate here, other than to say I am personally against
both of those.

          Seablade

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Patrick Shirkey <
pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
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> ardour-dev at lists.ardour.org
> http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-dev-ardour.org
>
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