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

John Emmas johne53 at tiscali.co.uk
Wed Jan 7 12:26:03 PST 2009


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joe Hartley"
Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] Could this solve Ardour's financial headache?
>
> I think the flawed logic is trying to get the people doing beta testing
> to have to pony up dough to do it.
>
> I see nothing but negative value in trying to charge for access to
> the SVN.  People who are testing the development code should in no
> way have to pay to do that valuable work.  I'd wager that the people
> who are accessing the SVN and not testing/reporting bugs is pretty
> darn small.
>
I guess it would be very difficult to quantify but according to mantis over
70 users reported bugs in December, which is a pretty respectable figure.  A
high percentage of them seemed to be in the SAE/OS-X distributions though,
so my guess is that they were (probably) using binary distributions.  It's
impossible to be certain.  But since the average number of reports from each
user was less than 1.5, my gut instinct is that these were mostly people who
found a bug casually, rather than people who consider themselves as active
beta testers.  The number of users who reported 3 or more bugs was very
small....  rough guess - around eight (and I'd be willing to bet it's the
same eight people every month !!)

Would users be less willing to report bugs if they had to pay for SVN
access?  I doubt if there's any correllation that's better than guesswork
but my own feeling is that people are usually *more* willing to report bugs
if they've paid for something.  Having to pay might make them think twice
and it might make them look for an alternative option but I don't think it
makes anyone less willing to report bugs.

John




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