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I submit that there is an excellent chance your program is worthless from an economic standpoint.

If it makes money (over $13,000 since January so far) then how does it make it economically worthless? I guess it only does only if you go "if X and Y and if Z then your program is worthless". Let's see if that's the way you go...

Unless you have done something that no one else on earth knows how to do, there is nothing stopping an open source developer from rewriting it and releasing it.

Well, what I did was fairly unique, and no one has rewritten it and released it, so what you're saying is "if an open source developer rewrote the exact same thing and released it for free then your program would be worthless". Yeah, that's a pretty big if.

Perhaps no one has done this yet—but to me, that means there isn't much demand for whatever you've done or it would have been a priority to the open source world.

So what you're saying is "your program must be worthless cause if it was worthy then someone would have taken the aforementioned steps to make it worthless". Makes you wonder how any software can be worth anything the way you view things. But again, if you were right my program wouldn't have made $13,000, which it did, so you're wrong that it's worthless, unless you have a definition for 'worthless' that somehow can be reconciled with "makes significant sums of money".

As I've argued in a post of mine you may have not read, open source is only able to compete with commercial programs when the appeal is, to developers, wide enough, and how feasible the task is to them. In my market, audio programs, there's very little FOSS software that compares with commercial programs, except for very trivial things that no one would pay more than $5 for. You can't even find a decent FOSS audio editor. So for something cutting edge like my program, I have little to fear, it's not just about anyone who could do something like this, and if they could they'd be stupid to give it up for free. And to use your style of self-proving argument, I'll submit that someone smart enough to write a program like mine wouldn't be stupid enough to release it for free ;-).

Just so you know what you're talking about, here's the program in question. The FOSS program that comes the closest is the FOSS project of mine it was based on, ARSS, which is a command-line utility, so yeah, doesn't really compare.

And I have a pretty good handle on the economic value given the fact that you're posting here on /. instead of skiing down an Alpine mountain while drinking Cristal and eating filet mignon.

You love arguments that magically prove themselves, don't you? I think the fact that John Carmack posts on Slashdot invalidates that, but I'm not rolling on gold either, although I do make a living off my program, which is in itself quite extraordinary considered what my program is and how not straightforward it is to convince people they need it (let alone pay for it).

Sure, there are outliers, but by and large people who accumulate a lot of wealth do so by creating value for society. I'm sure you can point to individual examples, but can you point to a significant demographic of the population that gets a lot for "doing much less"? I submit that you cannot...because if you could, there would be an influx of people wanting that job...salaries they could demand would go down, etc.

Dude, I work hard and make half the minimum salary. It won't be hard to find people who make ten times what I do while working less hard.

Look, if I tell you that I've created this epic application and I'll never update it or extend it or release it for others to work on or support it again, it's done for now and ever and nothing is ever going to happen with it from here on out, would you pay me for it?

I can tell you that even if you don't tell anyone that then no one will pa

That's how.

Hey dude!

Buy this one.

http://photosounder.com/

I really appreciate the non-slashvertisement nature of this article. But curiosity got the better of me and I was wondering if this might be the product (originally something I read about here)? If so, and you ever get terribly bored, how about a gimp tutorial? Like the snares and kick.

http://photosounder.com/

I totally agree. Being just a geek with good ideas and the skills to implement them, I thought to myself, why not just use them to make a commercial product that I would sell. The whole "making it" part was easy, that was my thing, algorithms and all that. Time consuming, but easy. Then came the "selling it" part.

All I can say is this, you have no idea how hard it is to market and sell something until you try it yourself. That's the hardest part, for someone like me, hands down. You need to know your market, how to market to them, know how to do, all of that stuff...

This is the commercial project I'm talking about. People were excited about the original idea, people are excited about the implementation, but the people who've even heard of it are scarce. Right now I'm just like an hypothetical Steve Wozniak without a Steve Jobs to whom people would ask "hey nice, this Apple I thing, but what am I gonna do with it?". The Apple I was the next big thing, but if it wasn't for Steve Jobs to explain to the world why it was the next big thing, there wouldn't have been an Apple II.

You're right, and I'm sure there's lots of new filters and effects that are possible with it. The problem that I have that makes it hard to promote this program is that I don't know what they are. Only lots of imagination and experimentation will reveal them. I think great things could be achieved using a Photoshop Curves-like tools (the Gamma knob being entirely representable as such a curve) so I will add such a tool in the future.

I wasn't trying to obtain anything specific with the drum beat video, but yeah, it's very easy to create convincing drum beats using just some blobs, although more sophisticated sounds could be created with a bit more work. I'm currently trying to create a whole drum kit using Photosounder, by first opening real drum sounds with Photosounder, and learning from what I see how to make such instruments. With a bit of work and tweaking, you can easily obtain quite satisfactory results. For example as a part of this experiment I created this bongo sound that I find fairly convincing. Done in Photoshop using 4 horizontal lines, 2 tiny bright blobs and one dark but larger blob.

That's true, but it doesn't mean they're right. I had this great idea when I was in college, a program to convert sounds into images, edit the images and turn them back into sounds. I thought it was the greatest fucking idea ever. Yet when I would share my idea with other people they would go "who'd want to paint sounds up anyways?" or "it won't work".

I've been working on the idea for a few years in my spare time, and now I turned it into a commercial program which makes up for my main source of revenue and my other source of revenue comes from a consulting contract I got from getting an earlier FOSS implementation of it noticed by an engineer in some mining company.

The point being, no one would like your idea now, but wait a few years and your university will be glad to get money off what you made from it.

Just because you actually created the program and make money off it, still doesn't make it that great an idea.

Guess what: everyone but you thinks your idea is stupid. Really. No one wants to steal it from you.

That's true, but it doesn't mean they're right. I had this great idea when I was in college, a program to convert sounds into images, edit the images and turn them back into sounds. I thought it was the greatest fucking idea ever. Yet when I would share my idea with other people they would go "who'd want to paint sounds up anyways?" or "it won't work".

I've been working on the idea for a few years in my spare time, and now I turned it into a commercial program which makes up for my main source of revenue and my other source of revenue comes from a consulting contract I got from getting an earlier FOSS implementation of it noticed by an engineer in some mining company.

The point being, no one would like your idea now, but wait a few years and your university will be glad to get money off what you made from it.

TFA makes a compelling point, but I have a mixed feeling about that. I have a commercial program that's currently Windows-only, but with plans to port to Mac OS X and Linux.

While a Mac OS X port is an easy choice, I'm not sure about the Linux port at all. On one hand there's all the advantages that TFA mentions, but on the other hand, who uses Linux for audio production, Linux has an especially small market share in that domain, plus the reason everyone's given me, Linux users usually don't like to pay, even less for closed source programs... and of course each platform I start to support with platform-specific code everytime means more work to implement, maintain and test... But how would I know if it's worth trying or not?

Sorry, what's the news here "Hey guys ScummVM has been around for eons but it's pretty cool check it out" ?

Oh did you guys here that there is MAME out there? It can play a bunch of old arcade games, maybe we should submit something to Slashdot to tell the world about it? Or can we just use Slashdot to tell people about any program we want to promote? That's really cool then because you see I have this new program called Photosounder and it does some pretty cool stuff with images and sounds you should totally try it.