[Ardour-Users] Could this solve Ardour's financial headache?

[John Emmas]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kevin Cosgrove"
Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] Could this solve Ardour's financial headache?
>
> I also vote no, if my opinion counts at all.  We need more
> subscribers.
>
No-one can argue with that, Kevin - the problem is that nobody has yet come
up with a (workable) idea for getting them....  :-)

>
> I've seen a bounty system in mantis.  I didn't dig into that much,
> but I suspect it's a way to pay to escalate a feature request or bug
> fix.  That's attractive to me, and seems like a smaller scale of
> company support.
>
Again, there's a fundamental problem - it's not working..!  It's pretty
clear to me that the best time to ask people for money is at the outset.
People who've been used to NOT paying for something are rarely receptive to
paying for it later.  OTOH if the software is supposedly "free" then there
has to be a way of getting it for free (source code and binaries).  But if
there's a more convenient way to get the latest source code on a daily
basis, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask people for a contribution
(e.g. a registration fee when they sign up for it).  Maybe the registration
fee could be voluntary - although I doubt that many people would volunteer 
to pay it....  :-(

John