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

[Paul Davis]

On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 17:30 +0200, Svend-Erik Madsen wrote:
> Kevin Cosgrove wrote:
> > Paul, would you care to weigh in on the PayPal issue, or rather the 
> > issue of finding an alternate method that meets your needs?
> >
> >   
> Hi all
> 
> If the payment method is becoming a political issue it's not gonna help 
> his finances anyway.

I'm refraining from commenting for a while because I think its just good
for me to watch the discussion. However, I do want to make something
really clear: there is no current issue with *MY* finances.

The issue of financial support for Ardour relate more to the long term
stability of the support. There are very few open source projects around
of a scale approaching Ardour's that do not have at least 1 person paid
to work on their continuing development, and so it is here - this
program will move only very, very slowly toward the level of
functionality that most of us want if its all done in 2hr chunks in the
evenings. 

Perhaps even more important for financial considerations is the ability
to get some more developers able to work part- or even full-time on the
project in order to advance it to a "tipping point" where adoption of
the program by many more people becomes inevitable. Right now, there are
several critical barriers, and the sooner we can get them torn down, the
better.

There are personal issues wrapped up in all this of course. I am at an
age where most programmers would be on 1 (or more) of 3 likely career
tracks:

	1) making a substantive income from sales
	2) being paid by a company that is doing (1)
	3) waiting to be bought out by Google or Microsoft

None of these appy to Ardour, which puts me in a situation that is not
particularly optimistic over the long term.

--p