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

[Cassiel]

Well, I substantially agree but "threatening" or not with messages like
"Without real financial support, development of the program will slow to a
crawl or stop. Your support is critical and much appreciated." it's a matter
of style.

A developer can write software for fun or to live and If he writes code to
live maybe OSS it's not a good market to gain money, expecially with a DAW
and at least not from end users (eg. not SAE).

Ardour is great, for sure, but if the goal is to earn 5000$ each month from
200-300 end users I would suggest to constitute a company and simply sell
Ardour just like any other proprietary software and without the community
support for testing and bug reporting.

GPL it's not addressed to end users, because end users does not really care
about the Free word in "Free Software"...

regards
Raffaele

ps: hope for no bad english... apologize if any



2009/1/8 John Emmas <johne53 at tiscali.co.uk>

> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Vecchione"
> Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] Could this solve Ardour's financial headache?
>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 1:19 AM, moron wrote:
>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>  Very well said, Thomas.  In fact, people often forget that the "free" in
> free software was originally intended to mean free as in "free speech", not
> as in "free beer".  The GPL only states that you must make the source code
> available along with the binaries.  It doesn't impose restrictions on what
> you can or can't enable in the software and it DOESN'T stipulate that you
> can't charge a fee for the provision of binaries, or source code, or both.
> The main weakness in the GPL is that it provides no mechanism to protect an
> original developer from an unscrupulous recipient.  Recipients are free to
> do whatever they like with the source code - and that includes using it to
> deprive the originator of their ability to earn a living from it.
>
> My proposal is not to charge for the source code - but rather, to charge
> for
> the convenience of being able to update the source code regularly.  It's an
> imperfect proposal and it would need to be structured such that it wouldn't
> penalise (or discourage) developers, testers and other contributors.  But
> AFAICT it wouldn't breach the GPL licencing agreement.
>
> John
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ardour.org/pipermail/ardour-users-ardour.org/attachments/20090108/daf805e2/attachment-0002.htm>