Is Open Source a diversion from what users really want?

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#148

Does anyone know what proportion of Ardour’s support libs are ‘C’ compared to C++?

The reason I’m asking is that for ‘C’, it’s usually possible to supply a suite of pre-built dev libraries (with header files) for each platform and the pre-built ones can be used with various compilers. Unfortunately this doesn’t work for C++ because of name mangling… though I suspect the majority in Ardour’s case are probably conventional ‘C’.

In the early days, Ardour incorporated its own versions of some of the C++ libs (e.g. sigc++ / glademm / gnomecanvasmm / rubberband / vamp etc). So if there’d been pre-built ‘C’ libs available it could’ve been quite a help for attracting new developers.

OTOH Ardour was a much simpler product back then… Nowadays it’s likely not the kinda product that budding devs can learn in just a few hours per week.

#149

There is currently a bus factor of around 2 1/2, and if you include derivative products like Harrison Mixbus, the number is significantly larger.

Anyway, finding out how to install build dependencies is trivial compared to writing realtime-safe code for massive multi-threaded C++ application.

But before starting to build everything from source, I suggest to search for “homebrew ardour” and/or “homebrew audio”. While homebrew has issues if you want to create distributable applications, it is a perfectly fine starting point (the same is true for packages provided by most GNU/Linux distributions).

Indeed, but to my surprise it recently took an intern at Harrison under 2 days to get started. If one is focused on fixing a specific bug, or contributing to control surface code, reading and understanding the whole codebase is not needed.

In any case reading doc/source_tree_layout.txt might come in handy.

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#150

Have a read of this article, especially the comments:

https://sourceforge.net/blog/open-source-growing-not/

Cheers!

#151

I would respectfully make a few points.

I know quite a few people inside the world of proprietary audio software development. Through conversations over many years with them, I know what hiring developers looks like when you can offer a fairly competitive salary: it looks terrible. There are very, very few people with the skills and background needed to work on the core aspects of a DAW.

As Robin noted above, and as we have seen over the 22+ years of the project’s life, people are able to “jump in”, typically most successfully when they have a relatively constrained goal. Our developer credits list currently has 81 names in it. That’s a lot more people than have worked on most proprietary DAWs and way way more people than have worked on other FLOSS DAW.

Would it be totally awesome if anyone who was interested in contributing to Ardour could spend 10 minutes to set up their environment and then get started? It absolutely would.

Do we have any idea how we could do in a way that did not act as a continually resource drain on the time of the existing developers? We do not.

There’s a lot of stuff written about contributing to FLOSS projects that is either misinformed in general, or significantly less true when applied to a project like Ardour. We would love it if it was easier to get started, but we also do not believe that doing so will open the floodgates to substantial numbers of new developers. The projects that benefit from an attention to “on-boarding” generally tend to those with relatively low barriers to entry in terms of skills. That’s just not the case for Ardour: it’s a big, very complex code base based on technologies that very, very few developers have much exposure to.

If someone were ever to volunteer to maintain a ready-to-use, always-up-to-date version of the dependency stacks, we would gladly host them. If someone were to step up and volunteer to function as an “on-boarding coordinator”, we would welcome them gladly. However, it is our (my?) fervent and serious belief that that return from the existing (2.5) developers spending time on either of these tasks is not an appropriate use of our time, given the expectations of the thousands of people who fund our work on the project.

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#152

we don’t support you if you want to build the software yourself (cause we provide binaries for a fee)
why don’t we have more developers?!?!
you know, does Ardour even need to be open source if noone understands it?
but we will not support you if you want to understand it

:clown_face:

Man, Krita is extremely successful and even has a Steam version and you can just download the binaries anyway and the maintainer, Boudewijn Rempt is extremely supportive of anyone who wants to build from source.
Edit: Here, even nightly builds, for windows.
https://binary-factory.kde.org/job/Krita_Nightly_Windows_Build/

but if noone pays for Ardour then we can’t work on it fulltime anymore

Then dont work on in fulltime anymore. Such a phrase does not make me feel pity or anything, it conveys to me that you want to do other, more lucrative things but “ony stay with Ardour as long as it pays but you’d rather do the other thing youd be doing if you weren’t paid for it”
So stop working on Ardour. Do the thing you’d do otherwise, and see what happens.

No really, do see what happens.

This is the youtube/media conundrum. “Without your support on patreon then we wouldn’t be able to make these videos”
Yeah well then quit!
“But I want to make videos…especially the attention w$%$e kind where I get to be a cool video personality”
Yeah, you do. So do it.

It’s also the chicken and the egg thing.
Did you get financed from the very start? If not, then how did Ardour even come to life?

Anyway. Instead of lamenting about open source being too obtuse, why don’t you teach people how to do it, beyond the basics on whose page you even go “Stop, do you really have to do this?” ?

Perhaps it would spark a passion in someone who might create something as good and accessible to everyone in the future, like ardour could be.

But yeah, I really really loathe the “I can’t work on this fulltime otherwise” thing prevalent in media.
Then don’t. Stop lowballing yourself with your ardour pity party and do your actual lucrative thing in the one lifetime you’re getting.

#153

I would throw that back and say “well don’t engage in it then!”

I have every sympathy for creators (whether software, YouTube or other media) who expect to get some remuneration for their work and I, personally, think it’s entirely reasonable to remind people that this is the only way they can continue to commit time to creating.

And, yes, creators have a choice too, but the choice they have made is to pursue something they love. Just because they have made that choice it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get paid for their work.

I (mostly) love what I do, in more conventional employment and it’s an active choice I have made to do the job I do.

But I still expect to get paid for my work, even though I love doing it. This is just a different business model.

The way I see it, it’s a bit like busking: if you are good, then you can make a reasonable living from it, even though you’ll never be rich, but you are always relying on people to contribute. Passing the hat around to encourage people to contribute is part of the job.

And it’s a perfectly legitimate job to the point where many cities issue official licences and performing spaces to buskers.

Of course these buskers, like the Open Source developers and YT creators, have a choice to go and get a job they hate in a call centre or something. But their lives, and ours, would be poorer for it.

Do you know what I loathe? People who expect to get software, services, and content for free and begrudge creators who ask for contributions.

Unlike most commercial enterprises, you have a choice, and if you don’t want to consume, engage, or contribute, that is fine. Just don’t whinge about it!

Cheers,

Keith

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#154

Why don’t you use Krita to make music then?

Jokes aside, the society we live in requires to gather money to feed, clothe and basically do everything you need to live.
It’s not ideal, it’s not working for many (TOO many) people but what can we do about it? If you want to revolt to change the system and convince enough people give me a call.

In the meantime I’m glad there are people like FOSS devs who don’t (at least for the FOSSoftware itself) bend to society’s greedy motto which is “profit profit profit”. And I’m also glad we can support them to continue working on it full time.

I’m so grateful for Ardour and FOSS in general. How amazing it is that I run a Free kernel with a Free distro maintained by a community and that I could start using Ardour by just downloading it from my distro’s repos? This is the kind of society I want to live in and to support this kind of society I need to support the community who maintains my distro (Arch btw), FOSS devs working on the software I love and use everyday, and that includes Ardour.

Thanks @paul @x42 @prokoudine and all other people contributing to Ardour and FOSS in general.

Hope I explained myself well enough.

Have a nice day!

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#155

Just… what are you trying to do here? Are you trying to shame the Ardour developers into giving you more support by comparing them to the Krita developers?

I understand the point you’re trying to make, and I agree with it to the extent that it would be awesome to have a simple build pipeline, but… could you please not attempt to guilt people who are giving you shit for free?

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#156

Even stall man thinks it fine to ask money for opensource software.

I remember one of his talks, and the problem with, as he called it, the English language.

The word free as in the freedom to modify, and see the code and a program being free as in free beer.

In my native langues (dutch), there are two different words for this.

#157

I’m sorry I’m responding here, because the thread is long and I don’t have the time to read all of it.

To me having a nice scripting GUI, with an easy scripting langage for users isn’t really a ‘profesional developer’ tool, it’s a user feature.

It’s a feature that can drive a bigger community, but it is not something that has something to do with the free or open source software quality of Ardour.
It’s a nice community feature, and people just wants more features. Nothing less, nothing more.

It can be good to have it on Ardour, if expanding the community is in the top priorities at some point. And bigger community can lead to more money and more core developers to come forward.

My 2 cents,

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#158

I don’t have much interest in commenting on the rest of your post, but here are a few notes on the excerpt above.

  1. Krita’s financial situation has changed. They are currently “flat-out broke”. This is a verbatim quote from a statement by project’s leader made in a public mailing list a month ago.

  2. I’m not sure if you are aware of that, but for the past few years, the right way to refer to Rempt has been “Halla Rempt”. Using that other name, I believe, is called deadnaming.

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#159

I think any new thread on paid binaries should get an automatic response with a famous rant by Harlan Ellison :slight_smile: And maybe a dead gopher, if you know what I mean :slight_smile:

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#160

I’m not sure if this will even be read at this point but I would want to offer some perhaps novel ideas that may seem dumb at first but please stick through my emotional argument until the end and really ponder what I’m saying, because I do have a point.

When I was in Denmark as a kid with my family there was this small little idyllic bakery with amazing freshly baked goods. The real reason I remember it, though, was that everything was FREE, and it was on top of this completely unstaffed. You just walked in, took what you wanted, and then you put as much money as you think it was worth in a little basket that anyone could steal —yet nobody did.

At the time I bet the owner made way more money from this than he would with a normal bakery in the same location. I don’t have any proof of this but consider the fact that I would travel across borders just to visit this place again. Would I even remember the exact same baked goods, or even better goods, in a normal paid bakery? I bet that the word of mouth of a free bakery spreads pretty fast.

Today I’m not sure if this bakery is around. People can be dicks and perhaps people were better off before mentally and socioeconomically. The point I’m trying to make still stands though:

What if the baker had a normal business model and then converted to the free one? The baker deserves money for his bread, it obviously costs him money so why should he give it away for free? He might be convinced to try out the free business model as an experiment, but he would probably lose money for quite some time. He might even be unlucky and lose A LOT of money if someone comes in and steals everything, which I bet happened even back then.

So what is my point? I have two points. The first one might be wrong but it would be interesting as an experiment if data is collected over some month(s).

In short I think that Ardour might (or might not) earn significantly more money in the long term if you:

  1. Drop/alter the requirement to pay to download binaries[1]. Still keep asking users to register and say that you would prefer that they pay. The only reason for this is that my (perhaps flawed) theory is that the requirement to pay at all will reduce the amount of people using the software and enhancing the project ecosystem (like making youtube tutorials, making plugins, or directly contributing code); in a way that is more harmful to the economics of the project than the immediate gains from requiring a 1+$ payment. If the ecosystem grows quicker from more people using the software, then not only does users increase exponentially which increases donations, but more big corporations eventually get involved and they have big money.

2.More on topic of the question: Windows. I think one major reason that people want to be able to do anything with scripting is that it’s incredibly difficult to build the project in windows as you don’t support this. That’s a pretty significant handicap because many good developers are also windows users (perhaps controversially, I would say that most good developers are windows users, since windows has a 80% marketshare and like 99% of the marketshare of desktop gamers, which tend to be good programmers).

The reason I went on the whole rant about monetization was kind of leading up to my second point. I think that it’s reasonable to deduce that implementing much better support for building and developing Ardour on Windows would reduce the amount of funding this project gets. I would personally not go through very much effort to support Windows if I was working on this project and thought that doing so would hurt the project economically. Hope I conveyed some nuance on this complex issue that is not combative/emotional/moralizing.

Thanks for making great software!

PS:

I want to add one more point that continues on the fact that most good programmers know Linux, but for one reason or another use Windows as their primary OS.

The fact that Ardour is currently the best DAW available in Linux (at least from what I’ve read), and also only officially supported on Linux leads to two things that immediately comes to mind:

  1. A sizeable chunk of music producers will not be Linux and OSX users. Why? Because Ardour is not (yet) the most established DAW, and also not viewed as even near the best one. This might be unfair objectively speaking, but if you look at what all the people making money end up using you see why it’s easy to get a biased perspective. This also leads to that a sizeable chunk of music producers will not be Ardour users, as most are not Linux users, and because Windows support is seen as an unsupported afterthought.

  2. Because it’s almost impossible to build on Windows, people that want to contribute windows-specific code will probably not do so which probably leads to a worse experience statistically speaking compared to something like FL-studio which has Windows as a primary target, this without taking into account all the developer horse-power lost from alienating Windows developers. Because of these reasons less people end up using Ardour as their first DAW. If those people are good they will give free advertisement to the other DAWs they’re using and that will in turn make less people take up Ardour as their first daw. If those people are good… (and it loops like this forever)

Combine what I said in points 1 & 2 and now imagine the Venn Diagram of good developers that are also good music producers.

1 Like
#161

Both Lua and ReaScript are interpreted languages. They do not require one to rebuild the DAW from source code at all. This also means that one does not have to go through the pains of rebasing from the upstream repository, cleaning up conflicts etc. Nor do you need to study the internals, get used to code style etc. You just write a script using a public API. Then you run it. As simple as that.

Windows is officially supported since version 5.0 (2016).

Source: The Ardour Manual - Microsoft Windows

I’m afraid, that kills much of your argumentation.

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#162

I use Ardour but don’t make music. I use it because it’s easy to use, user friendly, has the features I need and generally works well for me. Just thought I would mention this as not all people working with sounds make music.

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#163

Several years ago, Paul wrote that due to a lack of financial support, he may need to cease working on Ardour. IIRC this roughly coincided with the release of the Windows version, along with subscriptions no longer auto-cancelling after a year, both of which provided a significant financial boost. If I am not mistaken, a big chunk of revenue for the project is requiring a minimum payment for the binary, with Windows downloads being the largest portion of that revenue.

I don’t think giving away binaries at no cost would increase the economic gains of the project given what I have observed over the years. I think one flaw in your theory is the notion that giving away binaries at no cost to all users will somehow increase code contributions from a very small number of potential developers. Those who can write code can also build code and don’t need the paid binaries if they want to contribute. I also don’t see how people making YouTube tutorials or writing plugins would have any economic benefit to the project as those sources of revenue would go to the people making the videos or writing the plugins, not the Ardour project.

9 Likes
#164

what do you even want, make music with Krita, or shame the developer

No, I don’t want to make music with Krita.
Perhaps I do want to shame the maintainers, though, because I think the whole premise of “Do users even want open source?” while doing the best they can to dissuade users from building Ardour, literally going “STOP! Do you really need to do this?” in the documentation, is a bit shady.

Personally, I think OP has taken a sniff at the Muse group or something, which has been quite scummy, and postulating that that’s the way to go, when in reality, yes, the Muse group makes money with subscriptions and all that, but forks like Tenacity to not having to stick with Audacity, or going to places like Lilypond instead of Musescore shows that there’s a distaste for their greed.

OP wants to, now that Ardour is nice and proper, close his fist around the notion of open source because “who needs it huh? With us providing those nice binaries, huh?” while going teary eyed toward the people with “Sniff, we need it or we can’t develop for it full time anymore”
To which I quintillion dog dare any of them to stop and see if Ardour dies, provided it stays open source and not mainted by the current group anymore, handing over the entire infrastructure to a new team, who of course takes care of running server costs etc, that’s a given, but otherwise, they inherit the ardour brand, the website, the forums, etc, and the more I list of this you can be sure that OP is quaking in his boots because I can already read the mind going: “Hehe what’s stopping people from making a fork right now, why hasn’t a fork replaced Ardour if it’s so bad and greedy huh huh huuuuuh?” when the userbase behind ardour is important, as well.

And once again, Krita makes money despite offering even nightly binaries, free of charge, for anyone, but they still rake in cash. They don’t have to do a whole spiel about "Do people really need Krita to be open source now? Something most people don’t even understand (While , again, doing anything legally possible to dissuade people from building Krita as the dev team of Ardour is dissuading people from building Ardour)

It’s BS. It smells real bad. And you know what I wonder too?

I wonder if the binaries provided by the current team is actually the same thing you’d get if you built it from source for Windows and co.
Who knows if they tamper with it. They don’t support building on Windows, they could put anything into it. After all, you don’t need open source and don’t even understand it anyway, so why would you want to check in the first place, right?

People do want open source. Otherwise I wouldn’t be mad about this. This entire thing smells big time of greed and subterfuge. It really just conveys a hatred for the fact that the current team can’t just make the thing proprietary just like that.

I’ll be watching for something like a “contributors agreement” that transfers the rights to all contributions to some “ardour group” in the future, if it hasn’t already happened. Cause yeah, I smell Muse group here. Nothing good, nothing good at all.

Do I want the team to not get money? No. But this is ultra suspicious.
And any ‘customer’ should be on my side on this one. What? you want less for your buck or something?
Perhaps now that the team has your wallet by the balls, maybe you really will say “Yeah I’m fine” out of fear of losing access to it all.

What a great situation huh. Well, I’m on Linux so I can build this, you eat your slop if you really think I’m in the wrong here. Eat it good. Eat it good and proper. Here comes the airplane. Aaahhh.

#165

This is delusional. Nothing that I’ve said or thought has anything to do with “closing my fist around the notion of open source”. Ardour is GPL’ed, and will remain GPL’ed.

The essay was about a philosophical conundrum that I encountered interacting with users a few years ago. It isn’t a sign post to Ardour no longer being open source. There has been some useful feedback on the question in the thread above. The question itself remains unanswered, and likely always will, if only because there’s never going to be a single answer for all users. For some, it is a diversion; for others it is not.

As I said, your comment is completely delusional. If I was you, I’d delete your post. It’s going to look incredibly dumb in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years time when Ardour is still GPL’ed … and the question of “Is Open Source a diversion from what users really want?” will still be something to think about.

Also, I have absolutely zero interest in the Muse Group model, and never had.

16 Likes
#166

I do - and they don’t…

#167

I admire the way Paul trades this kind of bullshit.

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