[PD] Is open source better?

[Lorenzo Sutton]

Hi Pall,

On 10/02/2014 04:45, Pall Thayer wrote:
> This was a faculty grant at a US arts-focused college. I would say that
> 95% of students, 80% of faculty use Apple products. That really doesn't
> matter though.

As you asked for feedback..
I think it does. I'm not proposing the usual (sterile) apple vs. xyz 
flame, but I've noticed this "mac for music" thing in academia and 
conservatoires over here (Italy). One thing that surprised me is the 
attachment to this ecosystem in the electoacoustic music landscape, 
where one would expect people to experiment as much as possible with 
unknown and unfamiliar tools in all directions.
What is also interesting is to understand if the use of Apple products 
and software (e.g. MAX/MSP) is truly justified by creative/artistic 
needs or if it's just a matter of habit/convenience (this question in a 
neutral way, i.e. nothing against convenience).

I'm not sure how (much) this fits in the topic you're going to address, 
but I think it's an interesting angle to take into account. And I'll be 
happy to share my personal experiences further if you think it's 
interesting (as I guess my email was already rather long)

Ciao,
Lorenzo.


The project is out there. It can be ported to any
> platform if people want. More than anything, it was a proof-of-concept
> project.
>
> If it bothers you that this was developed as an IOS app then, by all
> means, take it and turn it into an Android app.
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 10:29 PM, Simon Wise <simonzwise at gmail.com
> <mailto:simonzwise at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 10/02/14 13:36, Pall Thayer wrote:
>
>         This is where things enter into the odd world of academia. In
>         all honesty,
>         I think our application for the particular grant that was
>         available was an
>         "outlier". The grant came with caveats. Projects were to target
>         technology
>         that would likely be used by faculty and students and the
>         resulting work
>         (publications or, in our case, software) would be released under
>         open
>         licenses. As far as I could tell, ours was the only project that was
>         producing actual software. We were able to pay the Apple Dev fee
>         for one
>         year from our funds but our application wasn't ready for
>         distribution
>         within that time so we never submitted it to the app store and have
>         released the source code instead. We were never big fans of
>         distributing it
>         through the app store anyway.
>
>
>     Well I guess the target platform is jail-broken Apples then.
>
>     Re academia ... I spent the last few years studying in an Australian
>     university, maths and computing ... the students were a reasonable
>     mix of linux, mac and windows users, not sure about the android/iOS
>     split, while the staff and teaching had a somewhat stronger emphasis
>     on linux and open source than the students. Matlab was the main
>     exception to this.
>
>     As a target platform android certainly has a much bigger user base
>     worldwide than jail-broken iOS, though the apples may be much better
>     for some audio uses.
>
>
>     Simon
>
>
>
>
> --
> *****************************
> Pall Thayer
> artist
> http://pallthayer.dyndns.org
> *****************************
>
>
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