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.
