@PhilR
I can tell you, you are completely off base, and completely misrepresenting what was said.
You can bang on about C/U ratios all you want, but that's just a wordier way of expressing the legendary standoffishness of Linux people towards - well - anyone who isn't a software engineering graduate. It's preposterous, of course, and denies the entire purpose of computers, but it's richly ironic to produce something like a DAW and then complain that non-technical people want to use it.
That isn’t it at all, and you are completely misunderstanding open source or intentionally misrepresenting it in this statement.
The point Paul has brought up, and I think is a valid point, though John’s work may work to disprove it somewhat, is that no current developer other than John runs Windows, and the major contributors do not(Not attempting to downplay John’s contributions here, more recognizing the massive contributions by others at given points in times). As such releasing a windows version to start with requires major work, work that John is doing at the moment. But then going through and SUPPORTING Ardour on Windows requires even more work. Not only must you develop and test on windows, which triples the testing required for every patch, not to mention the amount of work spent doing the actual coding, but you must also discern reports of all qualities. The latter part exists on all systems, but is exactly what the numbers Paul mentioned provide, an indication of the ratio of quality of bug reports and testing on all platforms.
...but I also suspect you would not accept that as a legitimate profession because it isn't software engineering.
Knowing Paul you are flat out wrong. I will let him speak to the former accusation in that sentence if he chooses to. The latter I know from conversations with him. I am a professional audio engineer, I work on many different scales, and in many different areas of the field. For the record, I am a sound designer that has worked in theater and animations, done work for commercials to pay the bills, recorded and released CDs, and consult on system design. I am also someone that has contributed code back to Ardour on occasion when I had time to do it myself, but can also tell you that Paul has been amazing in his support of Ardour at times, providing me with versions of Ardour that fix issues I have had within a matter of days to allow me to complete projects. Me being someone that understands or submits code has little to do with that, but instead is the willingness that I had to let him work with me to troubleshoot an issue in many cases, and compile a new test version, and test, rinse and repeat till we found the cause.
But really, Paul, if you want people to stop using Windows, forget Ardour, and start fixing some of the myriad problems that prevent people from using Linux. That would be a much more productive and useful application of your time. One of the last things that would stop me moving to Ubuntu would be the lack of a Protools clone, and this typifies the problem. Linux people need to stop writing DAWs and 3D effects for the window compositor, and fix the package manager, for instance. Priorities, people.
This statement is a strawman in this conversation that has little to do with Ardour or Paul. However that being said, I can tell you flat out that if tools were not available for me to do my work on Linux, I wouldn’t use it. If Ardour didn’t exist, I likely would never have used Linux as an full time audio production platform, nor would I be looking at returning to it full time again here in the near future(Currently on OS X). If the tools don’t exist to do the work that is needed on Linux, then people should rightly not try to switch to Linux, period. It won’t help them get the work done.
I simply don't understand. You spend weeks and months and years writing this stuff, then you behave in a deliberately prohibitive manner when it comes to letting people use it.
Hardly, he has not said that people that want to can’t work on getting it to work on Windows, John’s work is evidence of this enough. He has said he won’t support it at this time, which is understandable since he doesn’t run Windows to be able to support it first off, and secondly requires a significant investment in time that takes away from the primary development of the tool.
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