[Ardour-Dev] Licensing and enforced payments

[Marek Bajon]

> Maybe that's stretching the point a bit far but it does reinforce the 
> point
> that I made originally.....  whatever scheme is adopted, Ardour's 
> USERS need
> to face up to the fact that they are the beneficiaries of Ardour and as
> such, they should be the first port of call for funding.  If Ardour 
> can find
> new markets, or a state-owned sponsor or a wealthy benefactor, fine - but
> that support needs to be IN ADDITION to support from its general user 
> base,
> not INSTEAD OF it.
Well said.
As long as we treat Ardour as a romantic attempt to build a tool which 
is on par or even better than other commercial tools we must state that 
the community involved in this "adventure" should provide financing. 
It's paying for your dreams, like paying for an exotic trip.
However, if Ardour is to be commercialized, it cannot be distributed 
only as a source code. No professional user (even if he is a Linux geek) 
is willing to play with toys (OS-es, compilers, package managers) which 
are not his core business. They pay and demand - a binary, ready to use 
package which in case of Linux means a custom distro plus professional 
support with guaranteed response time (SLA). To sell Ardour as "Pro's 
Pro" tool there should be a company behind it. There are dozens of 
similar configurations (OSS + company offering professional support) - 
from RedHat to Digium&asterisk. If this way will be successful for 
Ardour - I don't know. You can buy Cubase 5 for $499 and it does 
everything that small studio needs. Can Adrour compete? I wish it could...


Regards
Marek