[PD] earning a living coding Pd

mark mark at junklight.com
Thu Jan 29 18:12:19 CET 2004


I am not sure that even if you where to package PD that you would have 
an easy job making a living - you would be  competing head on with Cycling
'74
and I am not convinced that the market space is that big. 

IF I was trying to make money out of PD (something I don't really think is
possible)
My approach would be the services model (see Jboss as one of the really
sucessful 
companies using this model). Basically build installations/projects etc.
based around 
PD. Audio visual installations in corporate lobbies, things for conferences
and trade 
shows. PD would give you a real edge against the guys trying to build custom
code 
for these things or using things like flash. You also stand a fair change of
charging 
a decent price for these things. 

cheers 

mark



-----Original Message-----
From: pd-list-admin at iem.at [mailto:pd-list-admin at iem.at] On Behalf Of
Hans-Christoph Steiner
Sent: 29 January 2004 16:52
To: pd-list at iem.at
Subject: [PD] earning a living coding Pd


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

________________________________________________________________________
____

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


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