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A very well-thought out response, so I'll respond point-for-point.

You make a critical mistake when you say that relying on ANY software is stupid - that means you can't use computers for anything critical. Clearly, many businesses use computers for their critical path. This is pretty much unavoidable - computers help us do stupid things faster and when it comes to personnel, time is money.

I agree with that 100%. I don't agree that relying on any software is stupid because it may stop being supported, but that is the logical extention to GP's argument. I'm not advocating the use of closed-source software, I'm just taking the pragmatic approach. This argument for OSS is popular, but largely unfounded.

Anyway, your argument seems to basically boil down to the fact that being able to sell software with an artificially increased value is good for programmers.

No, the core of my argument is that there is just as much danger of 'critical' software being abandoned/EoLed/etc... in the OSS world as there is in the closed source world.


This is true, but it's bad for users, and there is no reason we should guarantee that programmers should be able to reap rewards out of proportion to the amount of work they've put in. There's no reason they shouldn't be able to, if they are clever enough, but I can think of no reason that we should, as a species, assist them in doing so.


I'd prefer to find a solution that is good for both users AND programmers. I am not convinced that the GNU approach will even give programmers rewards in proportion to the work they've done.

With Free software, if the project is active, a bug will usually be fixed by a maintainer.

Usually, but not always. This one led me to scrapping a PHP project and rewriting in mod_perl instead, and it appears to have not been touched since August '04.


If it is not, you have a couple of options. You can move to another package - because the software is Open, you have access to your data.
You might have to pay someone to figure out how to extract it, but you have all the source and they can do that much more rapidly than if you are depending on a proprietary solution.
You can also pay someone to fix the problem - again, this is flatly impossible with commercial software.

Fixing it may be, but as projects like Samba, OO, etc. have shown us, accessing the data is far from impossible. Also, even if you can get your data out of it (which, I agree, is a good thing), in a corporate environment, you STILL have to deal with retraining issues when moving to the new packages. As you said in your first paragraph, time is money.

In short, when commercial software dies, you are simply up the proverbial dirty creek without the equally proverbial paddle. When OSS dies, you at least have recourse for fixes, extracting your information, what have you.

See above.

Eventually, I expect there to be two types of software: Closed software, which is horrendously expensive, and which fixes problems so incredibly tedious that no one would ever want to write an open source replacement; and Open software, whose programmers are paid for directed development and support (though I expect that the support would be handled by dedicated, second-string types, not the lead developers.) Most everything you use will be Free and free, while only the most obscure of niche software will be closed source. Even most of that will end up Open Source, as they are forced by Open competitors to open their product, in order to compete.

I don't see that happening until there's some sort of funding from somewhere that ensures that the OSS software is written to meet USERS needs rather than scratching the programmers' itches on his offtime. A good example of this is MusE which apparently requires one to be an audio engineer to even get it runn

in-depth technical presentations and demonstrations of many cutting edge Linux audio and MIDI applications.

(The domains are only shown in-line when they're part of the comments, not stories).

• With a high resolution display, you can barely see the pixel or two gap between the underscores. It just looks like one big long link.
• To find out what each link is for I need to mouse-over each one individually. But Slashdot doesn't even make of the TITLE attribute of A tags, so I need to look at some cryptic URL in the status bar to figure out where it will take me!
• The Related Links section is automatically generated from the links within a submission. But it's now rendered useless since it contains link titles such as 'many' and 'cutting'.

* MIDI workstation: logic audio | cubase | or even (puke) cakewalk

I've heard that MusE and Rosegarden are pretty decent, though I haven't really used either.

* Powerful trackers: buzz | FT2 | IT

Have you tried SoundTracker? I don't know much about tracking so I wasn't able to evaluate how good it is.

* Advanced outboard softsynths: reaktor | absynth | Q1 | grainlab

What about Spiral Synth Modular?

* Powerful sample editing tools: cool edit/96/pro | soundforge

I think Audacity is pretty capable. There's also WaveSurfer, and Sweep.

Btw, I'd be glad to be wrong, if someone would only point out the links to *stable* and *feature-filled* tools.

I see I've been conned into doing your homework for you. :)

It's nice to dream, but for now and for the forseeable future, the software just isn't there.

Not true. Check out Ardour, Audacity, Ecasound, MusE, or some of the other 10,000 apps on Dave Phillp's Linux Sound and MIDI Apps page

So far there are only pure MIDI sequencers or 100% recording applications

Several of the "pure MIDI sequencers" actually have some level of audio support: MusE, Jazz++, Rosegarden-4 and Brahms at least do. It's all pretty damn basic at the moment, but there are a few interesting initiatives like JACK (an audio connection toolkit, used by things like Ardour -- we've just got the basics of support for it into Rosegarden) that might help to perk things up in the near future. I think once a few applications get able to talk to one another, we'll have far more interesting prospects.

Caveat: I don't actually understand any of this stuff, I'm a notation guy.

http://muse.seh.de/

As the author of Quasimodo, I beg to differ. Quasimodo is not a sequencer, and more importantly, its a dead project at this point, for many reasons. You should be looking at MusE which is a really high quality MIDI sequencer. As an aside, if the MIDI specs look daunting, I would forget about even considering programming in this field. MIDI is one of the simplest protocols there is, and one of the simpler problems in the area of MIDI/Audio programming. --p