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

[John Rigg]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 01:40:44AM -0500, Thomas Vecchione wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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. 

I agree. One of the things that annoys me about closed source software
is the requirement for license keys etc. Anything that needs to connect
to the internet in order to be usable is in a similar category. Apart
from inconvenience, there are obvious security implications in
connecting a production DAW to a public network.

I don't object to paying for Ardour (and I certainly don't begrudge
the meagre subscription fee) but the extra effort of removing
this stuff before being able to use the latest code would
probably discourage me from doing so. It has to be possible to
get svn code that is free of these things even if it means paying.

John