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

[Thomas Vecchione]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 1:19 AM, moron <moron at industrial.org> wrote:

> On Wednesday 07 January 2009 21:37:55 Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> > It wouldn't be a separate binary. It would be a License key that you
> > input in the config dialog to be able to disable the ticker panel. You
> > purchase a one time or yearly payment of say $10 and you get a unique
> > key to disable it. I have seen this exact system with the acajoom
> > newsletter module for Joomla. Those guys are making lots of cash and
> > actively developing and growing their open source software. Of course if
> > you subscribe then you get the license key anyway.
>
> Howdy.  If Ardour did something like this you would be guaranteed to fork
> the
> codebase.  It goes against FOSS concepts for one not to mention that it
> would
> be be trivial to de-spam that portion of the code unless they tried to
> Tivo-
> ize it in some way (probably not possible since this is not an embedded
> system).  Heck, I would do it myself if I found it disruptive enough.
>

You know, for a list dedicated to a piece of GPL'd software, there is a LOT
of confusion about what the GPL does and does not enforce on the software
licensed with it.

The above statement is not correct.  You CAN have such a function in GPL'd
software, so long as the source code for it is availiable.  How effective it
can be is entirely up for debate since, as was mentioned, it would be
trivial to comment it out and recompile for many people.

Ok, now on to the meat of it.  I am not Paul, and don't want to sound like I
am speaking for him or any other developer of Ardour.  But recently a push
has been made to hopefully drive subscriptions or donations.  But care was
taken for two things, one that it would be noticeable, and two that it is
not to offensive to the user.  That is where the nag dialog came from in
Ardour 2.7.1 and newer that appears on export.  Personally I think the idea
was brilliant on Paul's(?) part in as far as placement.

The concept of tickers in ardour and otherwise, personally I am not in favor
of.  Ideally, my opinion,is that we would want Ardour seen for the
professional DAW it is.  Doing such a thing would take away from that.  Also
my own personal opinion is that anything that limits access to the code
takes away from the spirit of open source.  Providing precompiled binaries
for a charge is a possibility though to me, but I, personally, would not
want to see SVN read access become a priveleged thing, even though I am
likely someone that would have such a privilege I am guessing.

I had to delete the latter half of this post because I am getting to that
time of night that I am rambling a bit so I will leave it at that for the
time being.

         Seablade
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