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

[Patrick Shirkey]

sonofzev at iinet.net.au wrote:
>
>
>     My own view is that the best time to do this is early on in the user's
>     experience. In fact, most of the previous replies have only
>     confirmed a
>     point I made in an earlier post - namely that when people start
>     off with the
>     notion of NOT having to pay for something, they are rarely
>     receptive to
>     paying for it later. The best time to ask for payment is usually
>     after a
>     successful trial period - and the best way is either to make the
>     s/ware time
>     out (which isn't practical in Ardour's case) OR to offer something
>     that
>     isn't strictly needed but is highly desirable (such as premium
>     support) OR
>     to have a set of "pro" features that only work in the paid-for
>     version. I'm
>     sure there must be other options too - but the key is that they
>     must offer
>     something of value that you can't get if you don't contribute (either
>     financially or technically).
>
>     All of these suggestions are counter to the GPL licensing and FOSS
>     concepts.. to achieve these ardour would have to have a closed
>     source version. 
>
A binary release is a closed source version except that if you want to 
you can get the original source and compile it yourself. Many Mac and 
these days Linux users are not interested in compiling an application 
themselves.


Cheers.

-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.