Re: Free Software vs. Open Source: Where do *you* stand?

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Hi Pete!

Thanks for the opportunity to express my opinions, I really appreciate it.

I'm a Free As In Freedom guy. But I'm not a Free As In Freedom advocate.
I love using Free Software and it feels incredibly good to me, probably
because the rules that govern it match very well with my own
de-centralized, non-hierarchical, non-competitive philosophy. But I
don't believe in 'taking away the market' of propriatary software. One
reason for this is because I believe the proprietary development model
fits another philosophy very well that is also widely used.

If your purpose in making music is to be the best, the greatest, the
star that out-shines everyone else, that needs comparison to be good,
that thrives by being better rather than merely good, is competitive
rather than co-operative, the proprietary development model fits that
philosophy very well. The more money you make, the more expensive
software you can afford, the less other people can afford what you can,
the easier it is seperate yourselves from others and be the best, the
more successful you can be. If you wanna be the best musician out there,
Open Source will only work against you because every problem you solve
you solve for everyone else as well and there is no way to seperate
yourself.

If you don't care a lot if someone takes pleasure in outshining you
(yes, this takes a LOT of just relaxing when good ol' jealousy and the
like come up), if you want to let other people squabble about who's best
and instead lay foundations other people can rest upon, and simply be
YOU, go open source. The principles of Open Source (Or Free Software, I
don't differentiate very hard, actually) are working for you. You're not
going to be the best, simply because nobody is asking the question of
who's best, you will simply be YOU and that's that. Is ardour better
than seq24? Is the GNU C++ compiler better than the linux kernel? Is
your liver better than your kidney? Who's gonna be February's 'Organ Of
The Month' in your body? :) You can find answers to questions like
these... You could try asking someone like Bill Gates, Michael
Schumacher, or anyone interested in beauty pageants. Their answers, if
honest, will generally involve a lot of JUDGEMENT.

So who's gonna be listened to most? Peter Bessman, Carlo Capocasa, or
Britney Spears? Well personally I don't care as much about how many
people listen to my music as how much people enjoy it. If you're Britney
Spears people don't listen to you because they enjoy it as much as they
simply got used to it because it was so darn hard to avoid :) (Unproven
working theory)

So much for the principles. To make it practical, being a successful
musician (as in thinking "Wow, that music I make really rocks", be that
intrinsically or by comparison), it's going to take a lot of persistance
and a lot expanding your own limits no matter which way you go. And this
process, is absolutely positively going to be very uncomfortable. If
you're living fully, so goes my opinion, you're going to have an exact
50% balance of comfort and discomfort anyway. You'll have either the joy
of growing and the discomfort of expanding, or the comfort of the
familiar and the depression of stagnation. I'm almost certain there is
absolutely no way around discomfort anyway, it's just a matter of what kind.

(I am aware that some marketing people will disagree with me here and
then try to sell you something)

So will the persistence and determination come from using and expanding
the rough tools of the open source world, and accepting a certain
roughness in your music for a while, or from fighting off the
competition in the proprietary world? It's up to you... either way, you
WILL grow, you WILL learn, and each experience will be very good for
you, so in a way, it is impossible to go wrong.

Thanks for the opportunity to express myself, again! I just love to
ramble like this :) I hope my words will be useful to someone.

By the way, I think you're the coolest guy on the planet and most
important person on earth. (I tell that to everybody including myself
but if you're not a competitive thinker you won't mind :)

Cheers!

Carlo

PS: Here's an absolutely inspirational quote from someone I greatly
respect and admire, Paul Davis:

> and once again, please recall that the most of greatest recordings of
> the last 50 years were almost done on technology whose "sound quality"
> would generally be laughed at today.


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