[PD] The economics of Open source

[Richie Cyngler]

Great question. I'm really interested in this as well. Should be interesting
to see how it plays out in the list =P...

I've always presumed that all the devs are overflowing with academic funding
and are bug tracking while sipping cocktails by the pool.

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 7:21 PM, Pierre Massat <pimassat at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear List,
>
> I was trying to get Ardour to work last night and i came accross the forum
> on their website. I must say i was quite shocked to see how many posts were
> about money. I was equally surprized to see that the latest full version of
> Ardour isn't free (although you can name your price).
> Now don't get me wrong : I think i can imagine the amount of work that was
> necessary to write a software like Ardour from scratch, and i totally
> understand that the team who wrote it may decide that they should be payed
> for it.
> This leads me to ask two questions :
> 1) What are the economics of open source software, and how sustainable is
> the model? How does it work for Pd?
> 2) I get the feeling that open source developpers used to think that the
> idea of free (free beer...) software was cool, but 10 to 15 years down the
> line (that is, now) they're beginning to realize that they can't keep on
> doing this forever. Am I wrong here?
>
> I have been considering making a donation since i've been using Pd
> extensively for a few years now. But could someone tell me exactly how it
> works? Who gets the money? How is it split between the different
> developpers? For instance, i'm assuming that Miller Puckette should get a
> fair share of the donations since we're all using Pd vanilla at least, but i
> use HID a lot in my patches, so Hans should get his share too. And i never
> use GEM or Gridflow (cause i have no need for it at the moment), so i don't
> see why part of my donation should go to Mathieu or GEM's author(s). Yet i m
> sure that thousands of people use GEM, and these developpers should be
> supported as well. In short, how does it work, and how do we make this
> sustainable?
>
> Pierre
>
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-- 
Richie
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