[Ardour-Users] subscription support down, your ideas sought

[Patrick Shirkey]

John Emmas wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Vecchione" 
> <seablaede at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] subscription support down, your ideas sought
>>
>> Of course managing expectations out of such a system to understnad that
>> one person can only do so much work is something else.
>>
> Indirectly, this brings up the question of corporate sponsorship.  Paul
> mentioned yesterday how SSL had pulled their sponsorship arrangement very
> suddenly.  But my gut feeling is that this will always be a risk with a
> corporate sponsor for the very reason you stated Seablade - one person 
> can
> only do so much work.  Therefore progress (in the eyes of the sponsor) 
> will
> sometimes be seen as being too slow.  Ironically, the more sponsors - and
> the more demanding they are - the more disappointed they'll be.  
> Therefore
> the natural situation would be for there to only ever be a small 
> number of
> corporate sponsors at any one time (probably only one, in fact).
>
> Corporate sponsors might be more encouraged if they felt they were
> supporting a 'project' rather than an individual.  In other words, if
> corprorate sponsorship was being spread around between a small number 
> of key
> developers.  That (in the sponsors' eyes) would negate the fear that a
> single developer might get overloaded with work - perhaps work which they
> see as being unimportant but which is being driven by one of their
> competitors.  I don't know how you'd share the money out fairly.  The
> sponsors would probably expect a lot of say in it.  And there's an 
> inherent
> risk that it might alientate smaller developers who felt they were 
> getting
> left out.  The upside is that it would probably encourage corporate 
> sponsors
> to maintain their contributions and not pull out of their 
> sponsorship.deals
> unexpectedly.
>
> John
>

 From here it seems as though the above and the post from Thomas are 
already being done by Paul. He is obviously managing a team of 
programmers and IIUC has made financial contributions to them in the 
past including a dev conference which he hosted a couple of years back.

I think Paul is doing an excellent job of managing the project and 
keeping his paying contributors happy with his release schedule.

IMO the freeloaders who use ardour and don't contribute back to the 
community are ripping all the rest of us off who enable them to use the 
software.

However I'm guessing a large majority of them are using macs and they 
don't have much connection to us Linux guys in general. Most Mac users I 
know are smugly self confident that they know best and are more than 
happy to use pirated software to save money. It's actually part of the 
mindset AFAICT. I know mac users who have massive private servers where 
they share with their friends all the latest cracks and rips of the 
newest audio tools.

The only way to get them to open their wallets is to make them feel 
guilty for freeloading. They all know they are being cheap but most of 
them will be happy to spend a couple of hundred on a new piece of 
hardware if it makes them feel cool.



Food for thought...


Cheers.



-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.