As we say the biggest obstacle to the linux audio community is a lot bigger than programming. What we are essentially doing is introducing a gift economy in a world of barter economy. I'm a big fan of futurist Jacques Fresno, who advocates just that; a world where barter is unnecessary, because producers of crops and grain and builders and weavers all are so effective and so wise they have found a way to sustain all the population without using barter, essentially the same way free software is distributed. So the long run solution to the free audio problem is to persuade everyone in our society to provide whatever he or her does for free and find ways to make it accessible to everyone who wants it, and to make the same efforts today's marketers do to communicate to people why they should want it. The mid term solution is to learn to attract money to the point where linux audio software can be developed full time. There is a marketer called Joe Vitale (http://www.mrfire.com) who wrote a lot of books about P.T. Barnum. It was Barnum's recipe to offer something for free, and then make money on the way there. So what we need is to find a way to make free software development a lucrative thing to do. Damn Small Linux seem to be quite successful at that. So does, of course, the Mozilla foundation. I believe we need to treat free software like a commercial product, with the same vigor in promotion as in production; only that we divide our sales process in two. First we persuade our potential customer to use our product... then we persuade the person to donate. The whole difference is that we don't threaten people who decide not to donate but instead use our persuasion skills. It can be done. Carlo... Proposing not 'financed open source development' or 'a business which also produces open source software' but a complete fusion of and bridge between the two worlds as stepping stones towards a free society where this whole discussion is completely unnecessary because the problem has already been constructively solved.
