One thing I wish Ardour offered an alternative to buying binaries: buying support. In other words, be regarded as paying Ardour users even if we are not using official binaries.
I pay regularly for Ardour but I want to use my own builds based on more recent libraries. But if I do it and a bug appears because of the newer libraries I use, I cannot really report it because I am supposed to use the official build.
I think that we source-builders can help Ardour be more stable in official builds, making sure that when their dependencies are updated nothing breaks. Both @paul and @x42 have listened to us in the past, fixing some bugs that manifested themselves only when using newer dependencies. So I think our help is valuable but the current business model discourages us from opening tickets, because we are supposed to use the official binaries.
I would gladly pay to be considered a paying Ardour user even if I don’t use the binaries!
One tiny snippet from my personal experience:
I most likely would have never discovered Ardour if it had not been through the “free” UbuntuStudio distribution.
And the reason why I purchased an “official” binary was through the “export” reminder where I always clicked “remind me later”
I don’t see where the issue is here. There are enough people who have a subscription but use non official builds (myself included) and I never saw this being an issue in bug reports or similar. Of course, if the bug is not reproducible by the developers, it is very difficult to fix it and it is not in anybody’s interest that the developers badly allocate their time. My point is: this has nothing to do with paying user vs. non paying user but it is simply a technical restriction that the developers can (almost) only fix what they can reproduce.
So, have a subscription and happily report bugs if you are positive that they are indeed issues in the code base or future libraries.
But the official line (and I’ve seen it posted here many times at this point) is that there is no support other than for binaries procured from ardour.org.
For most users I doubt that they can be positive the issues are with Ardour source code versus say a packaging issue caused by a distro.
I’ve been around here for about 15 years and in this time Paul and the other devs have taken Ardour down a pretty impossible path - full time active development of a FLOSS in such a niche. You certainly cannot compare it to WordPress etc. Paul has given some interviews about the matter, so please inform yourselves.
You certainly can give your opinion on things, but most criticism here sounds to me like a pretty boring version of “I have no experience and no insight but I know it better”. No one “likes” paywalls, but arguing against them because your fundamental “everything must be free” mindset is allergic to a few dollars per major version… hm.
I’m a bit upset because Paul’s original answer to an attempt to jeopardize an income source was extremely nice. Plus: I’ve seen a lot of FLOSS projects fail, coming to a halt in development or simply never reaching a point where anyone outside the Linux domain could take them seriously because they didn’t get enough donations and therefore no one had enough time to work on it.
My comments above were never about getting Ardour ‘free’ from Distro package management or self-compilation or through some sort of school or organized means like that, it is quite clear Ardour is provided with Paul’s blessing and generosity in those ways (and others like AVL, Ubuntu Studio… etc. etc.). The context was getting the actual Ardour binary bundle in a way unintended or facilitated by Paul by going around the expected norms and the context would be something like the archive the OP created of course.
This sounds a bit rude. I’m very well informed and my arguments in this case are simply are based on the legality surrounding GPL freedoms. I have in the past and am now again paying a subscription so I can access nightlies while I’m on an old laptop that doesn’t handle compiling very well. I’m not allergic to supporting the developers as I am able but I also cannot abide people being ostracized simply for following through with rights afforded to them by the GPL. I myself have distributed binaries that I downloaded from behind the paywall and I now have a good sense of what people think of me because of it.
You are so off the mark with me personally it’s not even funny.
This is exactly my point @GMaq. “Expected norms” are unwritten and not to be found in the GPL. I grant you that cheating the Paypal system is definitely questionable but creating a post/archive on archive.org is perfectly legal according to the GPL. Is the difference between the OP and someone like me literally because of a few dollars or are people fundamentally opposed to the GPL freedoms?
If you read again I’m talking about the bundles specifically…
Also I’m not arguing anything about the GPL at all… I’m saying going around the paywall deviously and in cases outside Ardour stealing or distributing software or media that isn’t yours to distribute and then celebrating that as some kind of serendipitous way to obtain new users and participants is a real slap in the face to those of us who in the specific case of Ardour have just been quietly paying and supporting for years (or decades) and just simply do what Paul as our generous host suggests since it is HIS project and as Mike said earlier “we are all guests here”.
Tha anti-paywall argument may have legal merit, but the source code, distro packages, and Live Media spins provide it for free, the bundles are a specialized case and they have the audacity (obviously pardon the pun) to put one specially prepared incarnation of the source code behind a paywall and provide support for it, and this isn’t enough!?? Stop pissing on the man’s rug!
My post is not about you and it wasn’t meant to be funny. Posting after your post was merely accidental, with “you” I was referring to everyone that so fundamentally criticizes the way the Ardour team tries to fund itself, maybe I should have made myself more clear.
It has been made clear multiple times that the publication on archive org is legal. Just because it’s legal not everyone has to like it, even more if the purpose is very unclear and if it provides possible disadvantages for the project’s funding.
What I don’t like is that some people here seem to “know it better” when it comes the funding of the project, and especially the tone in which some of it is voiced. The devs have thought about that for the past 20 years, so any suggestion should come as that - a “suggestion”, not a demand.
We can agree on that I also assume with those 20 years of experience has come the ability to put on a thick skin and take the criticisms along with the compliments. My goodness, I’ve given far more compliments to @paul and @x42 since I joined the community perhaps to the point of sounding like a fanboy on occasion. But when I disagree, I’m now happy to say something that might be seen as contrary even when my voice is the sole one or in the minority. I also am not the type to go along with something just because the leader says so. The good news is that I believe Paul to be extremely benevolent as dictators go
OK, I’m really (really) done now. You won’t hear from me again on the subject (and the people threw up a great cheer).
It’s not just opinion. Microsoft’s strategy of turning a blind eye to piracy and pushing Windows and Office into the hands of users is quite well known. They would also sell student licences of Windows and MSDN for next to nothing. It was noticed that Adobe didn’t start enforcing Photoshop licences until after Macromedia were out of the picture. So they obviously believed piracy had some utility even if they wouldn’t admit it publicly.
In case you were addressing me, I’m not making that case at all. I’m just pointing out that the relationship between software piracy and lost sales is not necessarily one to one.
@roax1 this discussion is not just for the benefit of the devs.
Regarding the distribution model: I don’t think a comparison to Windows or Photoshop is justified here. While being true on a general level (software piracy does not necessarily cause lost sales), Ardour is a very special case: Niche product (much more than Photoshop), FLOSS, and it is provided for no money (source code and in distributions) and for money (paywall) at the same time. This model has worked over the last couple of years and is obviously better than some other models they tried out (e.g. sponsored bugs). I remember a while ago Ardour really struggled when there were too little donations (around the release of Ardour 3 if I remember correctly). The paywall system seems to have improved that. Call me old fashioned, but I wouldn’t want them to change a running system
What I as a “professional” in the sense of making a living from audio, video production both live and recording don’t get is why some people don’t get the relative perspective on spending money on Ardour.
Times are difficult with Covid restrictions still affecting artists, but still… a $1 subscription would be $12 per year. If this is an issue for the central tool of your recording studio, how do you ever manage to buy one single serious microphone? I surely spend a lot more on bass guitar strings each year.
I guess anecdotes won’t change your mind, but I too started my music making journey on cracked software. It made it possible for me to try out various DAW’s outside of the (often extremely limited) demo limitations, until I found the one I liked, which I then purchased. (FL Studio at that time)
I have now spent a ton of money on DAW’s and plugins and samples and such. (and nowadays don’t need nor want to use cracked software)
(also sorry I know this is a bit off topic)
edit: Also I do not condone the actions of the OP, plenty of good points in here about that already that I agree on.
You don’t have to start with cracked software today. You can get the Mixbus 7 offer for $39, or Energy XT (including samples and loops) for €19. Many “creative people” find it necessary to buy a Mac anyways, because their higher income fosters a need for status symbols, and OS X has the option for a free GarageBand.
If you don’t use a cracked stolen audio interfaces, you will find that these by Focusrite come bundled with Ableton Live Lite, Pro Tools First, and some more stuff. For those saying that there was no money left after they had bought the interface.
I started recording using Broadcast2000. Nowadays people think this is a British band. But actually it was the predecessor of Cinelerra. Not cracked, included in SuSE Linux back then. Switching to Ardour 2.x was like jumping from a tractor into a sports car.
My ‘mind’ was never that this doesn’t ever happen, it was that it is unlikely to happen a majority of the time and also vs. just having a normal paywall this whole back-alley lie, steal. cheat your way into going legit later is not a marketing strategy to be encouraged when you already have a conventional method of obtaining the software at a VERY reasonable range of pricing options…
You never have to use cracked software any more than you have to be an amateur music producer, but insofar as your examples are supposed to demonstrate how easy it is to get into music production without cracked software, I don’t they’re very good.
A young person starting out with nothing is not running a Mac, and is not dropping money on a Focusrite for a hobby he’s not tried. How many people run Linux? I run Linux and I don’t use it for audio. If you spend money on Mixbus and you want to produce electronic music…good luck with that.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who get into music production because they want to record their performances. Those people know what they want and how much they want to pay for it, but there are also plenty of people who have no idea how creative they are until they start messing around with some software they found lying around, or were given, or downloaded off the internet. They actually don’t care where they got it from; they just care what they can do with it.
I too find this discussion rather curious. It has always been possible to use Open Source software for free (which is as it should be IMO) and that has consistently made it difficult to fund development. The Open Source community has thrashed these issues out for as long as I’ve been involved (20 years or so). It is perfectly reasonable to raise funds by charging for binaries or support, but because of the way the GPL works it is inaccurate and unfair to describe this as a “paywall”. It is also rather mean to attempt to undermine efforts to raise funds for development. To then post about it on here is downright underhand, I’m not surprised Paul is upset. It’s also kind of weird to use archive.org for this purpose as its primary purpose is to share content rather than software. The Grateful Dead may have encouraged bootlegging, but generally charged for gigs and official releases because those shows cost a lot to put on. It just makes me sad when people don’t see the point in working together to achieve something good.
