Re: [LAU] Ardour3

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 12:47:00PM +0100, J?rn Nettingsmeier wrote:
> On 12/21/2010 04:50 AM, Paul Davis wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:44 PM, Ray Rashif <schivmeister@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> >> On 21 December 2010 10:55, Paul Davis <paul@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> >>> there were 16 commits to svn within the last 20 hours. some of these
> >>> were deep changes to the way things work (though hopefully not
> >>> resulting in any visible breakage, we don't know, which is why its not
> >>> released yet). do you really think that arch linux users who are using
> >>> a pkgbuild to try this out have any grasp of what is going on?
> >>>
> >>> maybe the answer, your answer, is "yes". i'm quite a bit more skeptical.
> >>
> >> I'd be as skeptical as you, if that's the question. There are bound to
> >> be those who just want to "try" ardour3.
> >
> > right. and that's the whole point. i don't want people who "just want
> > to try it" to do so at this point because i don't believe its ready
> > for them.
>
> i agree. but paul, there could be one benefit to distribution
> build-scripts: if they track the dependencies, they make it very easy to
> pull in all the required third-party libraries for a3.
> that is, they remove a major hurdle for a casual tester that doesn't
> want to jump through too many hoops to have a look at ardour, and who is
> capable of dealing with pre-release software and the required debugging
> procedure.
> (need to upgrade my main studio machine soon, and boy do i wish for an
> a3-build-requirements meta package...)
>
>

Now this debate is reminding me more of my old days in Product Management, where we had salesmen and customers who would basically clamor for pre-release alpha stuff, just to GAWK at it (or to dazzle customers with vaporware bullshit to get their business), or because they just needed what it did-- or was going to do, eventually.

It was a constant battle. Anything we did that was cool, if it escaped the lab, we'd get salesmen promising it to customers in order to get a jump on competitors who actually were SHIPPING what we were still alpha-ing, and the customers would get bent out of shape because it didn't work, and we would try to hold the hordes back by demanding that customers promise to test and give bug reports, which they often did not, it was just a giant mess.

Ardour is an unusual hybrid of commercial and open source worlds in that sense, because it DOES have a marketing "brand" and revenue stream to protect.

I really don't see any other open source projects caring whether users try something and it breaks and they don't report the bugs back. So what if it breaks and users go, "hmm, it's broken". Hey, it's open source, use at your own risk. If the distro puts crap in its repos, then switch distros-- liveCDs are cheap.

But in the case of Ardour, it seems like it's marketing problem that's at stake: you don't want people trying it and deciding that it's broken, then going with a competitor instead, or giving it bad press. Plus the alpha stuff is getting hyped, i.e. CDM doing stories on it (which may be the root of the problem, and again unavoidable because it's open source).

This whole dynamic doesn't seem to happen with any other open source project I can remember. Even something high-profile like Firefox, I mean, do they really care if someone packaged up an alpha of the latest Firefox for linux, and users tried it and it broke and went with Chrome or Konqueror instead? Would they get bent out of shape about that? I doubt it. So it seems like it's business driving this whole issue.

-ken
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Received on Wed Dec 22 00:15:10 2010