[Ardour-Dev] Licensing and enforced payments

Patrick Shirkey pshirkey at boosthardware.com
Thu Jan 22 01:57:26 PST 2009


Jan Stary wrote:
>
>> It will not make any money. It will make the person who actively tries 
>> to stop Ardour from generating income feel awkward and maybe if the 
>> collective will is turned against that person something unfortunate will 
>> happen to them like getting stung hit in the face or getting a zit on 
>> their forehead before a big date.
>>     
>
> LOL actually; but I don't think it will work - "we will think bad of you
> if you don't pay us" is not going to make anyone pay. It's only gonna
> make people think less of Ardour.
>
>   
In this case I was referring to anyone who forks the code. Not the 
people who don't contribute.

>>>> I think most rational people and busy developers will not be bothered to 
>>>> maintain a fork of Ardour just to make sure a License key for mac users 
>>>> and people who are unable to compile a binary isn't part of the system.
>>>>         
>>> No. Ardour is an opensource project.  Ardour users can and will compile
>>> it from source code (including Mac users, which you seem to have picked
>>> for some reason).  "Maintaining" such a fork would basically mean posting
>>> a diff with a few carefully placed #ifdef's each time Ardour makes
>>> a (crippled) release.
>>>
>>>       
>> I'm betting they will find it easier to just compile with the License 
>> option disabled.
>>     
>
> Whoa! You mean there should be a _compile_option_ to (not) include
> the licensing code? What's the point then?
>
>   
That has been on the table since the start of the discussion. I'm sorry 
you missed that point.

A License is not necessarily to stop a program from being crippled. It 
could be to enable new features that were not paid for during 
development or to allow the user to turn off a ticker etc...

The application would still work and be completely usable. It might not 
be as efficient as humanly possible but mostly it would just be more 
obvious that we expect people to contribute to the development process.





-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.






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