I do not see how sharing binaries in any manner is an abuse of freedom
I think we’ve both explained our reasoning as to why it is and isn’t clearly, so at this point it’s safe to say we just disagree with what is specifically okay to do and not do in regards to courteous use of the GPL and CC.
Perspective from a new customer…
I just went through an encounter with the download page of the Ardour website that was very confusing and frustrating to me as a new comer. I ended up giving a donation when I thought I was giving the money to get the download. After giving enough to cover two years of a buck a month I found out my “donation” didn’t count toward getting the download link.
In order to do that I would have to do a subscription or a one time payment of an unspecified amount.
This instantly made me feel like I had just experienced a bait and switch from a company I know little about. Whether their motives are pure or not.
After the initial shock of being turned down for a product advertised as free when I had just given money,
I began searching the pages of the website. On other pages I had to hunt down I found the answer to my questions.
The experience was not positive for a first time visitor.
Surely there is a way to put “all” the relative information to this way of doing business on one single page with clear and precise directions rather than a new customer having to scroll through the website to discover the nuances of the transaction.
My mistake was there are three green buttons under the description of ways to “give”. Just to the right of that on my screen was a block of space for giving. Since the program is advertised as free, I thought that was where one donates to the further development of the program. I never pressed the green buttons as I thought they just highlighted the giving options. Honest mistake on my part.
Paul has graciously refunded my payment to PayPal.
Having said that, other than the bad start due to a confusing pay system, I am happy to give such a small amount to further development of this program.
Reaper gets $60 for a regular “license” to their program and unless I’m mistaken that is open source material as well?
Other top commercial DAW’s go for $ 5-7 hundred. I know, I own them.
I own Mixbus7 32C. Wondering if it is the exact Same front end? I paid good money for that.
I pay $10 a month to Netflix… $5 bucks for a mocha for crying out loud. Nobody continues to work for free and survives.
The paltry $1 a month for a DAW of this quality and for all the long, long hours of development that went into and is still going forward is well worth it.
To me this is a no joke very capable DAW and should be valued as such. ( Based on my experience with Mixbus 32c. that is)
As a new forum member it is disappointing to see such squabble about such a good DAW for $12 measly dollars a year.
I have been researching Ardour recently and wanted to give it a go to see how it compares to Mixbus in work flow.
Yes I’ve heard about the MIDI lagging behind modern functionality but I am more of a singer songwriter guitar player guy so my need for MIDI is not as great as an EDM guy or gal would want.
The MIDI seems sufficient for me with my limited MIDI skills
I just really like the overall workflow and the sensible layout of Ardour/Mixbus.
Thanks to Paul for such a great product and for assisting me with a refund.
Now that I know the proper procedure for acquiring the download I will happily proceed.
We all get stuck on tiny details at times that detract from the bigger picture.
In this case, to me, $12 bucks a year is not even an issue. Go buy one plugin and see what you pay.
REAPER is closed-source software and the discounted license is $60. The full commercial license is $225. More information can be found here: REAPER | Purchase
This is about the GPL-ness of Ardour and what a user is allowed to do after paying the $1 a month subscription or whatever value you choose. It’s not squabbling about the price and I certainly don’t want to get stuck into a debate about what $12 means to one person versus the next. We must be very careful that we are not seeing everything only through first-world goggles. But again, it really isn’t about price but liberties afforded after freeing the binaries. As an aside, I am personally against a paywall and would rather see income generated other ways but I’ve subscribed myself (for the nightlies) and donated larger amounts because I, too, value the open source philosophy.
Which ones out of interest do you own that are in that price bracket?
Welcome, and thanks for your thoughts. A few points:
Reaper is not open source, and cannot be freely redistributed (legally)
Ardour is not advertised as “free” by anyone associated with the project. The confusion over the meaning of this word in English (i.e. it fails to differentiate free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech, or in French the difference between gratis and libre) ensures that we strongly attempt to avoid that word except for specific situations where both meanings apply (e.g. when getting the source code to the program).
We tend to assume that people who want to download the program will see and click on the button/text that says “Download” near the top of every page on the site. You apparently found something else that you felt was relevant to downloading, but from your description I do not know what that is. If people miss the “Download”, then I think we can assume they will miss any other “single page” that we might want them to find.
@paul, clearly I am in the minority here (even a minority of 1, perhaps) in the way I think about GPL and the Ardour project so I’m going to exit stage left and leave the community to it. The last thing I wish to do is negatively influence new users. It has been a lot of fun and I wish you and Robin all the very best for the future. I’ve learned a lot and gotten a lot of pleasure out of Ardour, learning to compile it and contribute to loudness workflow etc.
No hard feelings at all!
No particular need for that. The discussion so far has been civil and interesting and illustrative of several different perspectives.
I actually share this feeling too. One difference, however, is that I don’t have any belief that there is any other way that would come close to generating the income the project needs.
Aside from the DSP and the more mixbus-optimised UI, I discovered recently, when setting up a multi-timbre plugin, that Ardour has a much more sophisticated routing engine that can have many channels per track that Mixbus has disabled.
I remember having a similar experience. I thought I hadn’t gained access to downloads, but I just wasn’t looking in the right place. Did you come direct from the demo? I think that’s what caught me out.
I can remember the FSF going after Mepis (an old Debian based distro that was sort of the Ubuntu of its time) for failing to provide source code with their binaries. Linking back to the Debian website was not good enough for them. If I recall correctly, the founder of Mepis was so disgusted that he shut down the project rather than comply.
I think the difference here is that MEPIS was linking to a downstream provider, not the upstream source, where if they had provided a way to link their packages to the upstream sources instead, it would have been fine. The Ardour website contains a copy of the source code that you can download so I think it’s okay to just link to the site because they’re the upstream providers. I’m not 100% sure on this and I’m not a lawyer so take that with a grain of salt.
Also I think it’s worth noting that Ardour uses v2 of the GPL, not v3.
Ardour is licensed under the GPLv2 or any later version.
The VST3 SDK uses the GPLv3, so recent releases of Ardour are effectively GPLv3.
I see, that’s good to know. In that case if you’re acting as a provider, is ardour.org still enough, or would you have to specifically link to the github mirror or git.ardour.org? The download page tells you how to obtain the source, so that is clearly fine, but the public mirror of the binary releases doesn’t do that at all, even the comment posted only actually links to a single version of the source, when there are multiple binary versions included.
Yes, we could probably get this 7z file be taken down on a technicality, but IMHO it is not worth the trouble. It is not even complete and some files in there are corrupted, too (0 bytes long, or just 1.8kB).
I mainly publish code in terms of the GPLv2+ so that users will always have access to the source code, and source changes can be returned upstream. Everyone wins.
I have little interest to track down GPL offenders, and very much prefer to instead spend time working on the Ardour for people who appreciate it, with the goal to encourage [financial] support.
I see no benefit for the Ardour community to spend time on this issue. If someone want to obtain Ardour (or any software) without paying, they’ll always find a way.
As a distro packager, I always recommend users of my package to pay for Ardour and even pay for Ardour myself.
I don’t think people who distribute Ardour outside the official website are damaging the income of its developers. On the contrary, they are expanding Ardour’s user base and every user can potentially be a contributor (money, bug reports, translations, design, marketing like making YT videos or code). What damages Ardour’s profitability is the freeriding mentality, or the lack of consumer ethics: the idea that hard work should not be rewarded.
I think this idea comes with education but the FLOSS community should do more to spread this concept: that if someone can afford to contribute to a FLOSS project, they are morally obliged to contribute to it. As a Christian, I find a justification for it in the Bible but people with other beliefs can use economics, philosophy or common sense to find a reason to donate to FLOSS programs they regularly use.
In any case, I find it absurd that some people would pay for REAPER but not for Ardour, just because they can get the latter “for free”, then complain that Ardour does not have as many features as REAPER. Of course it doesn’t; if it everyone paid what they pay for REAPER, more developers could be hired to work on it!
Also I believe the GPL should be paid a premium, not be a reason for skipping compensation entirely! But again, this comes from personal ethics, not opportunistic free market behavior.
I hope in the future, perhaps when Ardour’s profitability dims, the Ardour Foundation is created. A foundation helped immensely project like Blender and Krita become top-of-the-class, even compared to their proprietary competitors. I know @paul discussed this in the past and maybe today it is too soon for it, as Ardour can still reach its monthly goal, but in the long run it would secure Ardour’s legacy IMHO.
This statement does not bear out in the real world at all, did the original users of Napster and the like go and buy the albums they downloaded? Does the guy using KODI add-ons buy the movie Disc (or buy/rent it on Apple/Google/etc.)? Does the kid who downloaded the warez crack reg key buy the $300 software? In all of those cases maybe ‘case zero’ paid for something but then they Robin Hooded it to everyone else, now maybe the GPL keeps the sheriff away for doing this but people who exploit the payment system to obtain the binary bundle and give it away are not the kind of people that will be posting here or taking the time to create a tutorial or doing anything but cutting and running with it and scurrying back under their rock with it. There’s the GPL and there is altruism and there is common sense and a realistic appraisal of how human beings actually behave… this act whether legal or not was NOT to benefit or bolster support of any kind for Ardour at all to believe otherwise is somewhat naive…
Now you’re talking! Agree with this part 100%!
Just popping back to say:
“The discussion so far has been civil and interesting and illustrative of several different perspectives”
and another saying:
“I see no benefit for the Ardour community to spend time on this issue.”
It’s confusing for the community to know whether to continue dialogue given both statements came from positions of power within the community.
In some of those cases there are of course people who were never going to pay, and if the system were so secure that it were impossible to bypass then they wouldn’t convert to paying customers, they would just go and get / use something else instead. The reasons why might be attributable to all kinds of socioeconomic factors, as well as individual morals or ethics, but the end result is the ‘myth of lost sales’ I alluded to earlier. There is an irony that of course this thread has generated a lot of debate, and that the unintended consequence of such is that it - and the link to alternative downloads - is more visible than it would otherwise be (and here I’ve just contributed to that process again… 
)
I think its very generous of the ardour devs not to censor forum content too vigorously, but personally I would think it quite justifiable, and understandable to at least remove or nullify the link contained in the original post.
In ‘pay what you want’ there’s a calculation going on, which is that some people won’t pay - which they don’t have to - some will redistribute, though they’re not supposed to, but, all of those ‘lost sales’ are your advertising, in effect. Often the biggest cost is advertising - pay what you want relies on the ‘free’ aspect to do that, and it works best when the product / artist / has a loyal fanbase who are likely to pay but who you need to get the message to first. (And as a ‘case study’, something like the ‘radiohead’ experiment it was the first time one of the biggest bands of the time had done anything like it, so in addition, it became its own story, the media ran with it and the publicity increased exponentially. Some may have initially dismissed it as crazy but it turned out to be a very clever business move)
It would be the beginnings of a very slippery slope.
The forum moderators can decide what they find acceptable - I have no problem with that as we are all guests here. I’m very much of the ‘I would defend to the death your right to say it…’ view regarding free speech, but my feeling about this particular incident is in the context of all that we know about how it was achieved. That, to me at least, feels not so much like free speech but a more calculated and harmful act which is a different matter.
Re-read the context in what I said this:
I have no interest to track down GPL violations of binary redistribution. In particular since it is legal when done correctly.
Anyway, I still find it frustrating that from all of the Ardour 6.7 release, this became the focus of attention.