> I'm uneasy about the implications that mere rumor compelled Joerg to > abandon NE, though as I said, I respect Joerg's wishes and his > accomplishments with regard to NE. I'm confused as to why Finale's > presence might force a developer to consider his own work a closed case. > > After all, Finale is expensive, closed-source, and not necessarily > suited to everyone's work methods. NE is free software, open-source, and > works nicely for me. I would hate to see it disappear. > > Joerg said that since sources are available anyone can continue with > NE development. I hope that happens. I think you're seeing a simple and ugly reality being played out here. The Open Source Software movement works well for things with a very large userbase of appeal, but when things start to get vertical, and professional music/audio software is pretty vertical indeed, the number of people who are talented enough to make tools worth using *and* who have the time + energy to devote to writing software for free is very very small indeed. As the size of a piece of software's audience gets smaller, the %age of its userbase who are also actively participating coders, designers, and the less sexier areas of a coordinated software development process needs to increase, or you will just not see any tools. As it is in the commercial audio arena, the pricing models reflect a highly vertical market size. If millions of people bought Pro Tools or Cakewalk, it'd be priced accordingly. There is a great deal of dedicated full-time audio engineering being performed to make these products interoperate and work cleanly in a purpose-built manner. This takes time, money, and the realistic sources of revenue to fund these efforts. As heretical and perhaps counter-intuitive as it may sound, "early adopters" of an emerging platform like Linux Audio need to either put forth funds (as in filthy lucre) or earnestly committed engineering expertise towards these products, or they will just not happen. There is no tooth faery who is going to come down from Mount Avid with a Linux copy of Pro Tools, or any of the countless "evil, proprietary, but indispensible" tools audio professionals rely upon for their daily bread, which is after all, about making noises for other humanoids to ultimately enjoy. Cheers, =MB= -- A focus on Quality.
