[Ardour-Dev] Licensing and enforced payments

[Patrick Shirkey]

Quentin Harley wrote:
> Patrick Shirkey wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>
> That I understand all too well
>
> The message is clear.  We need more money to flow into the project.  
> We just need to make sure we don't cause more problems.   If Ardour 
> becomes a "pay for features" locked product, what will the status of 
> Ardour be in the free Linux distributions.  Would they be able to 
> include it in a usable form without paying unit royalties the the 
> Ardour foundation?  If not, it will be excluded from those 
> distributions.  The exposure Ardour got because of these will be lost.
>
> I agree about the money, just not the how at the moment...
This is an excellent point which was semi glossed over before now.

We are not locking the app and there would be no royalties. Distros or 
people with the skills would be free to build the app with the licensing 
code disabled.

- The target audience is really the mac crowd who are using the app and 
are also used to paying for things. Another market is companies that are 
forced by regulations to use legitimate versions of software.

- There is also a large number of new users who will be coming in via 
the netbook surge over the next few years. These are people who want to 
do things cheaply but are generally not that computer savvy. They will 
be happy to pay for advanced features if told to do so. I suspect that 
we are already seeing a large uptake of people who are just starting to 
get used to their netbook which they have had for a few months or even 
since xmas.Over the next 6 months we can expect a massive surge from 
this group of people. 30% of netbooks shipped last year ran Linux. Most 
of them were Ubuntu.

- In the latest Fedora releases there is a simple interface which gives 
people the option to purchase the sorenson codecs for use with Amarok. 
This feature did not stop Fedora from shipping.




-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.