[Ardour-Dev] Licensing and enforced payments

[John Emmas]

Jörn - there's nothing in my proposal that would prevent you from being able
to apply a patch if you wanted to test a specific bug fix.  Nor is there
anything to prevent the fix from being checked by one of the volunteer beta
testers.

The only drawback might occur where someone reports a problem that
the developers / testers can't reproduce and a developer wants to know
"can you still reproduce it in the latest version?"  Naturally, if the
reporter can't obtain the latest version, that would present a problem.
But there's a obvious caveat here....  in situations where a bug can't be
reproduced (even though it's not known to be fixed), the fact that it might
mysteriously disappear when the reporter updates to the current version
isn't actually a reliable indication of anything so I'd question whether
that particular scenario has any value.

Testing a specific fix (quite obviously) IS important for feedback but that
could still be done by applying a patch - OR by letting one of the volunteer
testers check it.  A dev should only be fixing bugs anyway if either he (or
one of the volunteer testers) can reproduce it.  Devs shouldn''t be wasting
their time chasing bugs that nobody can reproduce.

I understand your logic Jörn, but I don't agree that this would create a
serious problem.  There are other ways to crack this nut.

John