Pete Bessman wrote:
This email is way, way longer than I intended it to be, and for that I apologize. Remember that I'm not looking to stir up any hostilities, I just want to hear where people stand on The Issues and get a sense of the community. I predict that there are people here on a moral mission, and there are people here because they get a chubby out of openness and collaborative development and such. But I don't think I'm going to see anybody who's primary interest is making music --- although I'd love to be proved wrong, and I certainly think that things will be different in the future as the tools get better.
I have been using Linux for well over 10 years now, both professionally and 'for fun', in both server environments and desktop environments. It's my OS of choice for most things, including multimedia. I've even produced DVDs with Linux and done 3D animation with Linux, using completely free software.
That said, I'm not that political about open source and Linux. I like open source software and the community spirit it engenders... I like looking at the code of the application I am using, trying to figure out how it works, and so on and so on. I like having a choice with window managers and widgets sets.
Even when on Windows, I use a lot of open source software -- gaim, emacs, CygWin, Perl, Eclipse, and in fact in my professional work, we use mostly non-proprietary software (even though our primary product is closed source). It helps keep our development costs down -- we recently dumped some old commercial CM software for Subversion, and dropped using Borland JBuilder in favor of Eclipse, and it saved us loads of cash. And there is general agreement that our internal development processes are much smoother and easier to maintain now that we dumped the old software because it wasn't *extensible*.
My music studio is a hybrid system. I use Linux for all of my composing/sequencing and recording/mixing. I have a second machine running Windows because there are certain plugins and applications for which there just aren't equivalents (yet) on Linux, and they probably don't run well under Wine or the various VST plugin support on Linux.
So let's hear it! WHAT is your NAME?
Brett
WHAT is your QUEST?
An honest man?
WHAT is your FAVORITE ALBUM?
What do you mean? African or European? -- Brett McCoy: Programmer by Day, Guitarist by Night http://www.alhazred.com http://www.cassandrasyndrome.com http://www.revelmoon.com
