[Ardour-Dev] Licensing and enforced payments

[Justyn Butler]

2009/1/22 John Emmas <johne53 at tiscali.co.uk>:
> Could I please urge everyone to think quite hard about the SVN option?
> I entirely understand the initial hostility but if you take the time to
> think it through, it really is a good (and workable) idea.

I think you aren't considering the heavy cost of this idea.

Repository access is required to make improvements to the code.
Perhaps it is not obvious at first, but believe me it is true. You
simply cannot work on out of date code without taking a big risk with
your time.

While I have never worked on Ardour, I have contributed to various
open source projects, sometimes fixing little bugs that affect me and
occasionally adding more time-consuming functionality. I also often
work with projects to file detailed bug reports and test fixes
provided by others.

We're all busy individuals, our time is valuable. It is not a trivial
matter to me when I divert my time to spend with a bug - a bug in
software I don't usually develop for, that is. As all my systems (PCs,
servers and embedded) run open source distros consisting of literally
hundreds or thousands of individual projects, the next bug or minor
feature is almost always in a project I have never looked at before.

I know it is not the intention to make me pay when I want to help with
the code. I can contact some developers and ask them for free access,
and they will surely grant it, regardless of whether I am likely to
make progress or not.

However.

I suspect I don't need to explain to you what it is like when you
suddenly decide to spend an evening working on a bug or piece of code.
It is RIGHT NOW, I'm not going to bed until this is working. To have
to wait for someone else to green-light me working on the code would,
almost always, lead to me coming to my senses and leaving well alone.
By the next day it is forgotten, if necessary I find something else to
fit my need, more often I just live without the fix.

And I see Jörn has beaten me to it with more or less the same point.