Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] Finale for Linux
From: Daniel James (daniel_AT_mondodesigno.com)
Date: Fri Jul 09 2004 - 13:19:11 EEST
On Thursday 08 Jul 2004 8:29 pm, R Parker wrote:
> You could contact Daniel James from the Linux
> Consortium, linuxaudio.org, and ask his advice.
My view is that pure software companies producing only proprietary
applications are the least likely to be interested in Linux, and
that's probably no bad thing. Linuxaudio.org has not engaged in
making this kind of request for porting, and I don't expect that it
will.
Think of it from the proprietary point of view. Firstly, there's no
established mass market of people making music on Linux who are
prepared to pay for non-libre software. There is a market like this,
a subset of Apple users who don't used cracked software (my guess
would be a minority, but a significant one).
Secondly, most specialist music software companies are relatively
small. They don't have the resources to provide decent support on
more than one platform - and even Windows support can be fairly poor
sometimes. Offering Linux support would be a stretch for them.
Thirdly, even though Apple uses libre software in its products, it is
still proprietary-minded. (It would love your code to be released
under a BSD licence, so that it could re-brand it and sell it back to
you. Microsoft has no problem with BSD licensing either).
Of course the companies that have grown up around Apple and Microsoft
share this mindset - and so it's easier to consider porting a Windows
application to OS X than from OS X to Linux, despite the challenges
of very different APIs. It's a cultural issue, not a technical one.
My advice would be that if you have the money to spend on Finale or
Sibelius but you want to run it under Linux, invest that money in
developer time on a program like Rosegarden or Denemo to give you the
features you want instead. That's a serious commercial proposition,
especially if you are running multiple workstations.
Cheers
Daniel
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