Subject: RE: [linux-audio-dev] stats please.
From: Ivica Bukvic (ico_AT_fuse.net)
Date: Sat Oct 13 2001 - 20:13:08 EEST
>a recently published book, whose author was interviewed on NPR, claims
>that this idea that the USA is particularly litigious is in fact
>false, and the result of the way the media covers certains kinds of
>litigation. specifically, she claimed that the US is, statistically
>speaking, no more or less litigious than most other "western"
>countries. we have a very large population, but the per-capita rate is
>actually about the same.
While I obviously have no books to prove my statement, my experience has
been that only in the US was I able to hear about someone suing a company
for selling "too hot coffee" because they, by spilling it onto themselves
while driving a car with coffee in their lap, ended up burning themselves
(need I name the case? :-). This is why every product in US has a bunch of
disclaimers -- there must have been at some point someone who just had to
try to do something stupid like putting a shrinkwrap over their face to see
if they would suffocate and then ending up suing the company... Call me
sarcastic if you will, but I've not had the opportunity to hear of such
cases in Europe, or maybe in Europe such cases simply do not get the
publicity as they do here. Also, keep in mind that statistics can always be
twisted and turned whichever way you like it -- a glass of water can always
be viewed as half-full or half-empty.
>the author of broadcast2000 has been utterly elliptical in his claims
>about litigation, has never (AFAIK) answered any questions about
>clarifying his concerns.
This may be so, so I do apologize if my example seems to be out-of-place.
>That's not what i've heard when i've talked to steinberg. but perhaps
>it would be different for "smaller" companies. Heh. Yesterday, I was
>looking at a 1986 issue of Keyboard magazine. It had a small ad for
>"Steinberg Music Software", run by a US importer.
Again, I have extrapolated my conclusions based on my conversaton with
Sibelius devel team (although I do understand that this is not an audio app
in its true sense), who expressed absolutely no interest in developing
Sibelius for Linux [at the time, at least], as well as base my thoughts on
what I heard from other sources (i.e. discussion boards, such as this one).
If you have heard something different in respect to Steinberg, please do
share the good news with the community :-).
>Can you tell me one piece of commercial audio application software
>that licenses drivers? Or licenses anything, for that matter? The only
>thing I have heard of are companies that make h/w supplying different
>drivers (e.g. the giga api) to support applications better.
I stand corrected. It does seem that hw vendors are the ones who have to
jump through licensing "hoops," but even in that respect, hw vendors would
just have to release specs to the alsa community (which some of them do
rather poorly) and thus save big bucks by not having a full-time linux
driver devel staff.
There is, however, one relatively recent development, the so-called E-WDM
drivers released by www.egosys.net company (hw vendor), which supposedly
unify all architectures (ASIO, WDM, Sonar, Giga etc.) into one with
incredible latencies (advertised as neing 1.5 ms for Sonar). I am not sure
as to how they plan to release these drivers, whether they will license them
to other vendors, or will they just use them on their hardware in order to
boost their sales.
>Too bad none of them could talk to each other. Uh. Guess I should do
>some more work on JACK, right ?
Absolutely :-). Speaking of which, is JACK currently capable of replacing
arts and esd daemons in its current state? Is this even a part of the
long-term plan? It seems until we get a sound daemon which will be not only
extremely efficient, but also backwards compatible, Linux will suffer of
lack of user-friendliness in that department.
Ico Bukvic, composer
http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/
ico_AT_fuse.net
============================
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