[PD] earning a living coding Pd

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Ok, so the last thing I wanted to do was start a flame war, and I am  
sorry to say that I fanned the flames a bit myself (apologies to Olaf).  
  But there is a common thread and that is that many of us would love to  
make a living working on Pd.  But what I think would be very productive  
is an honest discussion about how we could do this.  There are two  
basic ideas: commericializition and strange, newfangled free software  
methods.

There are two ways I see of commercializing Pd: making a proprietary  
program based on the BSD codebase; or selling free software like  
RedHat, SuSe, IBM, etc. do.  Personally, I do not think that the  
proprietary path would work with Pd for a number of reasons: its a  
crowded market space and most of the cheap development gains from it  
being free software would be lost (AFAIK, most of the code besides  
Miller's is GPL'ed).  But I do see some promise in the RedHat-style  
packaging and selling of free software.  But either way, it would  
probably take a lot of capital to get going, and that is the tough  
part: we are basically all broke musicians/artists/etc.

Then there are the newfangled free software methods: donations and  
bounties for specific projects.  There are examples of both of these  
working.  Donations seem to be flowing more for art/music projects (ie.  
the online movie example I gave earlier) and project bounties have a  
decently long track record, starting with the FSF being contracted by a  
number of CPU makers to port gcc their CPU.  Or you could go further  
back, to the pre-commercial software days, ie before Microsoft, Apple,  
etc., when this was the standard way that software was written.   
(Unfortunately the U.S. military was doing the majority of the paying  
back then).  http://www.sourcesupport.org looks like a well thought out  
model.

None of these are guaranteed to work and they all have pitfalls.  It  
seems to me that the project bounties idea has the lowest cost of  
entry, in terms of capital, hours of time needed to set it up, and time  
devoted to organizing a fair method of disbursing the money.  Also,  
there could be all of these things going on at the same time, there is  
no reason why that couldn't happen.

.hc

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                     There is no way to peace, peace is the way.
										-A.J. Muste