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Why wrestle with it even for a second? If a piece of software is useful, use it. If it's useful enough to pay money for, pay money for it. It's just not an a

Why wrestle with it even for a second? If a piece of software is useful, use it. If it's useful enough to pay money for, pay money for it. It's just not an area that requires ideology to enter into your decision-making process in any way. As you've noted, they've got a guy on the internet saying every possible thing there is to say. Do yourself a favor and ignore pretty much all of them.

jdietrich 17y ago
Because I have personal experience of being completely shafted by software companies. In a past life I was a music technology geek. Recording engineers spend huge amounts of time, effort and money on learning our preferred Digital Audio Workstation software, which has come to replace almost every piece of equipment in a modern recording studio. Think of it as the audio equivalent of Photoshop, but with half a dozen competing alternatives. It's the kind of software you go on training courses for, the kind that comes in a huge box to make you feel like you're getting your money's worth, the kind that has multi-thousand dollar plugins available. The market leader, DigiDesign Pro Tools, only works with DigiDesign's proprietary hardware, which can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Two major upheavals shafted a lot of audio engineers. One of the most popular DAW suites is a package called Logic. After nearly twenty years of development, Emagic sold out to Apple and Apple decided to abandon the PC version. Suddenly guys who had used the same piece of software all day every day for a decade or more were faced with either buying at least one top-end Mac, having to learn to use OS X and potentially a whole bunch of other software, or abandon their preferred DAW and have to relearn how to do their work in a different DAW. Either option would prove enormously expensive for a lot of engineers, both in direct costs and lost work. When Apple shifted over to Intel, there was a huge lag from many developers in getting updates released. For engineers, this is a serious problem - having the fastest hardware and the latest software is a significant competitive advantage. A lot of people lost out on work, or had to buy PCs or new audio hardware. The experience of that world has led to my current position. Professionals in all sorts of disciplines have huge personal investments in particular software and are often completely betrayed by the developers. EULAs are a one-way street and only the most rarified of enterprise software has any sort of reciprocal commitment. What Stallman talks about isn't purely abstract. Relying on proprietary software is dangerous, for very straightforward practical reasons.
- jasonkester 17y ago
  Wouldn't the software continue to work on PCs, or did Apple have a way to remotely kill every copy? If not, why was it any more of an issue than if it were open source and the developer abandoned it? In other words, what happened to make the software that you were running for 10 years suddenly cease to be useful?
  - edanm 17y ago
    Some people sleep better knowing the "abandoned" software can always be taken up by other developers, because it's open source. Others sleep better knowing there's a company with a financial incentive to keep the product alive. Honestly, either way, I don't see where morality enters the equation. It's not wrong to release software that's closed-source, it's your choice as a developer. It's not wrong to give up some of your freedom, it's your choice as a consumer.
  - tome 17y ago
    For example, do you think the users might have considered it a bit of a risk continuing to use software they knew there would be no bug fixes for?
  - jdietrich 17y ago
    You're fine until you upgrade your hardware, or install a new plugin, or need to import a new file type. You end up in the same predicament as people still using IE6 - the software is as good or bad as it was when it was still being supported, but the rest of the world has moved on around you. Beyond that, in most industries there is constant competitive pressure to be using the latest, most powerful tools. If you don't have an upgrade path, your setup falls further and further behind your competitors. The recent fashion for overt Autotune is a good example - in a relatively short space of time it has gone from being a relatively unusual effect to being de rigeur in some genres. If you can't keep up with those trends, you're going to lose work.
    - elblanco 17y ago
      The outstanding question though is that in this type of case, high-end domain specific software, the pure open source model tends not to produce the ultra-high end software. The reason, though it seems to mystify many open source advocates, is that it takes lots of money to make a unique or novel thing on time spans of less than a decade...and the only way to recoup those costs is by selling that thing at some price and keeping the IP closed. Multi-thousand dollar plugins are one example. In other words, going open source in this type of sense means that you won't have the latest and greatest anyway. So your particular case example doesn't change things.
tome 17y ago
That's not necessarily a wise long term view. As the GP mentioned: lock-in.
steveklabnik 17y ago
> If it's useful enough to pay money for, pay money for it. Money doesn't have anything to do with it. His point is about freedom, not cost.

jdietrich 17y ago

Because I have personal experience of being completely shafted by software companies. In a past life I was a music technology geek. Recording engineers spend huge amounts of time, effort and money on learning our preferred Digital Audio Workstation software, which has come to replace almost every piece of equipment in a modern recording studio. Think of it as the audio equivalent of Photoshop, but with half a dozen competing alternatives. It's the kind of software you go on training courses for, the kind that comes in a huge box to make you feel like you're getting your money's worth, the kind that has multi-thousand dollar plugins available. The market leader, DigiDesign Pro Tools, only works with DigiDesign's proprietary hardware, which can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Two major upheavals shafted a lot of audio engineers. One of the most popular DAW suites is a package called Logic. After nearly twenty years of development, Emagic sold out to Apple and Apple decided to abandon the PC version. Suddenly guys who had used the same piece of software all day every day for a decade or more were faced with either buying at least one top-end Mac, having to learn to use OS X and potentially a whole bunch of other software, or abandon their preferred DAW and have to relearn how to do their work in a different DAW. Either option would prove enormously expensive for a lot of engineers, both in direct costs and lost work. When Apple shifted over to Intel, there was a huge lag from many developers in getting updates released. For engineers, this is a serious problem - having the fastest hardware and the latest software is a significant competitive advantage. A lot of people lost out on work, or had to buy PCs or new audio hardware. The experience of that world has led to my current position. Professionals in all sorts of disciplines have huge personal investments in particular software and are often completely betrayed by the developers. EULAs are a one-way street and only the most rarified of enterprise software has any sort of reciprocal commitment. What Stallman talks about isn't purely abstract. Relying on proprietary software is dangerous, for very straightforward practical reasons.

jasonkester 17y ago
Wouldn't the software continue to work on PCs, or did Apple have a way to remotely kill every copy? If not, why was it any more of an issue than if it were open source and the developer abandoned it? In other words, what happened to make the software that you were running for 10 years suddenly cease to be useful?
- edanm 17y ago
  Some people sleep better knowing the "abandoned" software can always be taken up by other developers, because it's open source. Others sleep better knowing there's a company with a financial incentive to keep the product alive. Honestly, either way, I don't see where morality enters the equation. It's not wrong to release software that's closed-source, it's your choice as a developer. It's not wrong to give up some of your freedom, it's your choice as a consumer.
- tome 17y ago
  For example, do you think the users might have considered it a bit of a risk continuing to use software they knew there would be no bug fixes for?
- jdietrich 17y ago
  You're fine until you upgrade your hardware, or install a new plugin, or need to import a new file type. You end up in the same predicament as people still using IE6 - the software is as good or bad as it was when it was still being supported, but the rest of the world has moved on around you. Beyond that, in most industries there is constant competitive pressure to be using the latest, most powerful tools. If you don't have an upgrade path, your setup falls further and further behind your competitors. The recent fashion for overt Autotune is a good example - in a relatively short space of time it has gone from being a relatively unusual effect to being de rigeur in some genres. If you can't keep up with those trends, you're going to lose work.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    The outstanding question though is that in this type of case, high-end domain specific software, the pure open source model tends not to produce the ultra-high end software. The reason, though it seems to mystify many open source advocates, is that it takes lots of money to make a unique or novel thing on time spans of less than a decade...and the only way to recoup those costs is by selling that thing at some price and keeping the IP closed. Multi-thousand dollar plugins are one example. In other words, going open source in this type of sense means that you won't have the latest and greatest anyway. So your particular case example doesn't change things.

tome 17y ago

That's not necessarily a wise long term view. As the GP mentioned: lock-in.

steveklabnik 17y ago

> If it's useful enough to pay money for, pay money for it. Money doesn't have anything to do with it. His point is about freedom, not cost.