[PD] Re: PD-list digest, Vol 1 #919 - 12 msgs

[Kjetil Svalastog Matheussen]

"marius schebella":
> > From: "Hans-Christoph Steiner" <hans at eds.org>
>
> > I think that a
> > lot of people who use Pd would be willing to give money to get the
> > features that they want.
>
>
> I don't think so. None of the average Pd-users is voluntary (??is this the
> right word??) willing to pay a Cent. Yes, if someone really needs a feature
> and is willing to pay for it, then he will give money for it, sure, but I
> never heard that happened. People pay artists/composers for their work and
> applications using Pd... but programmers don't see any of that money, only
> if they are programmer and artist in one person.
>
> it is good that Pd is free and open source, in that way there is no
> financial barrier to use it (only technical, ....) BUT: i still dont
> understand, why software should be free at all??? i think the main reason
> is, that it is still unusual to pay via internet or bank transfer, and that
> there is no copy protection and people have no scruple about stealing
> software. so solving those two problems: 1) finding an easy way of payment
> and 2) making it unpossible to do illegal copies would give a totally new
> view of the software/programmer/Pd/money problem.

Its not about money. Its about making good software. To be able to make
good software, its extremely nice to have access to other peoples sources
so we can pick up tricks, develop further, fix bugs, etc. And by sharing
our sources, we can get bugfixes and patches from other people working
on our programs. Its also a matter of safeness. By having the source,
I can much easelier (is that a word?) fix bugs the software might have
(happens all the time) if I need to use that software. If you are not
a developer, its might not be that easy to see the great advantage
that open source gives, but for a programmer its kind of addictive.
I don't want to touch non-open source programs. I simply don't trust
such things.


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