[PD] Re: [PD-dev] SourceForge "Donations"

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Thomas Grill hat gesagt: // Thomas Grill wrote:

> - Given that, 100$ within 5 months can't pay my rent, so i'll have to charge
> some money for upcoming developments. None of the current packages will be
> involved, including flext, but some large future packages will. Clearly,
> these will have functionality that none of the currently published
> PD-related stuff has, otherwise it won't make any sense.

You certainly have a point here. (I also bothered you with bug reports
and never paid anything.) It is very difficult to make money as
developer of free software if the business model is based on selling
this software.  One of the most popular examples is Paul Davis, author
of Ardour and Jack. He devoted about 5 years solely to developing
Ardour and financed this from his own money which he once made as one
of the founding developers of Amazon.com. This money is more or less
gone now, so Paul also is looking for a way to squeeze some money out
of the Ardour project and currently he is considering selling in-depth
documentation. He probably cannot sell Ardour anymore, because several
other developers wrote code for it as well.

I also don't have a good answer. 

Personally I think, that more public funding should go into open
source software. Like Miller probably developing Pd as part of his
university appointment or like the EU is paying for the AGNULA
project. Free Software is in the public interest.

This also is a conflict between "sciences" and "economy". If there
were only commercial software developers than a lot of projects
wouldn't exist, the same goes for science: there are a lot of things
which wouldn't be a topic of research because their economic value is
small or non-existant. Like some kinds of music can only survive
because of public funding (also indirect through things like public
radio stations giving composers of experimental music a job.)

ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__