[Ardour-Users] What is to be watermarked?

[Paul Davis]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 10:40 AM,  <christian at shamanbenefit.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
> To: christian at shamanbenefit.net
> Date: 10.08.2010 15:44:19
> Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] (no subject)
>
>> I guess most people fear about the watermark.
>
> Without Paul telling us what he actually meant by "watermark", fear and discussions about this are pretty pointless.

I don't mean anything in particular. However, I can imagine that there
might be versions of Ardour in the future (pre-built versions) that
would contain some unique ID. I have no particular plans for this
myself but it has a number of potential users in terms of actually
counting unique instances.

People who get upset by the idea that this is some kind of copy
protection would be missing the point that ardour has no copy
protection, and never can, by virtue of its license. Tracking distinct
copy usage though might be useful though, so I don't want to design a
census scheme (to use Ubuntu's term) that rules this out even though
there is no such mechanism in Ardour right now.

And, obviously, just as with the "census" scheme overall, nobody would
be required to participate. As noted by several people (including
myself), if the machine is offline then the entire process, even if
approved by the user, will do nothing (though it might store a counter
that could possibly (with approval) be used in the future.

Some of the commenters here clearly don't know how difficult it is to
plan the development of a program like Ardour when you really don't
have a clue who your users are, even in the broadest statistical
sense.

--p