[Ardour-Dev] Licensing and enforced payments

[Jamie McLaughlin]

> 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...

Well. Why not let's try it? This for me the most obvious solution -
asking professional users to pay for something appreciably tailored to
their needs.

This way, the code stays Open Source and we avoid nagging, tickers, and
other elements which would demonstrably make the program worse. We ask
pros to pay for the elements they need and which Open Source alone does
not provide: verified binaries and professional support agreements.
Isn't this pretty much the standard model?

--

Marek Bajon wrote:
> 
>> 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
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