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

Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com
Wed Jan 7 12:41:49 PST 2009


On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 12:26 PM, John Emmas <johne53 at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> ----- 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

So as there's no confusion John I suppose many if not most folks
actually using Ardour would have no problems paying $35 under some
sort of circumstances. I'm out of work, haven't earned any real money
in a long time, don't use Ardour and I'd probably still pay. It's sort
of a no brainer. I have contributed a bit of money a couple of times
in the past.

However, I don't personally think this sort of contribution really
makes much of a difference. It's spotty at best.

There are problems. Ardour development, like most every other OS
project I've ever looked at, isn't developed with the 'customer' in
mind. How many times have we heard that 'we should be happy with what
we get since we don't pay' or something to that effect. We get the
features that developers decide to add. Ardour doesn't have the
features I need to really commit to using it long term so I don't.
That doesn't mean that I don't have the greatest respect for the
people that do the work. It's great work, but it doesn't support my
needs. I've been asking for MIDI since 2001 or 2002. It's now 6-7
years later.

Again, I'm NOT complaining. I'm just pointing out that it doesn't have
the features I need so its _value_ is fairly low to me because I
cannot do the music composition with it that I want to do. Some sort
of hodge-podge group of Linux apps tied together by hand to send data
around isn't user friendly to a user who just wants to sit down, write
and play. To someone else who runs a studio and wants to use open
hardware and software it might be very valuable. to academic types who
like to wire things together it's invaluable.

Just my view,
Mark



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