[Ardour-Dev] Licensing and enforced payments

[Patrick Shirkey]

Quentin Harley wrote:
> Thomas Vecchione wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I also have to vote against (if my vote is worth anything)
>
> If ardour 3.0 is going to "crippled" in any way, I would be happy to 
> stay with 2.x until the cripple ardour idea failed and became 
> uncrippled again ;-)
>
IMO the people on this list are not the target of the proposed License 
"features". So if they, like you chose to stay with 2.0 it wouldn't make 
much impact to the bottom line. I'm sure they would be vocal about their 
choice and I can imagine some would even consider actively campaigning 
for the demise of Ardour.

Voting against a simple way for Ardour to make some cash is effectively 
saying to Paul that you don't really care if he is part of Ardour 
development any longer.

Instead we should be fine tuning the concept so that it is more 
palatable for everyone.

There are supposedly thousands of people who are using Ardour who don't 
contribute in any way shape or form. If they did we would surely know 
about them.

There are many compromises in life and when you've got to choose between 
your kids education, retirement and health insurance among other things 
compared to the self absorbed feelings of a few rowdy Linux users the 
choice is fairly simple.






> Cheers,
> Q
>
>
>>
>>           Seablade
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Patrick Shirkey 
>> <pshirkey at boosthardware.com <mailto: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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>>
>>
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>>
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>>   
>


-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.