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OK, but that doesn’t answer the question. That shows why you personally would feel better about it, but it says nothing about why a company should change a mode

OK, but that doesn’t answer the question. That shows why you personally would feel better about it, but it says nothing about why a company should change a model that is working for them to a model that would require more work (it’s likely that Resolve contains components and libraries that would be very difficult to open source and would require rewrites — to say nothing of the general work required to make a project open source and accessible) for frankly very little gain. Again, given the various codec, driver, encoding, and other patent and license encumbered issues related to video stuff, I would seriously be surprised if this was something BMD could open source even if they wanted to. And for what? The 0.0001% of video professionals who insist on using an open source piece of software to use for their work? It works on Linux not for the free software crowd but because video professionals who are using specialized Linux servers for high-end editing workflows (using almost entirely proprietary software, I might add) requested it. As a side effect, desktop Linux users also have access to a pretty great editing suite. I like open source too. I think that it is generally a better development model. I also understand why specialty tools often aren’t open source and think that history has proven to us time and time again that the financial upside to OSS is not what people wish it would be. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice. But for Black Magic, I honestly see absolutely no compelling reason why it would be better for them to invest a bunch of money and resources into changing a model away from something that works to pacify an extremely small number of users who aren’t even their target audience.

blagie 5y ago
That does very directly answer the question of "why." You answered the opposite question: "why not." Neither of us know enough about BM's business model, plans, codebase, etc. to know whether open sourcing makes sense, and if so, how. I trust BM is doing something reasonable here. The only point is that the decision isn't obvious. In terms of 0.00001%, my experience is that bigger businesses care a lot about business continuity. I'm at a large organization, and it's cheaper to buy than build. At the same time, it's lower-risk to buy open-source. That's where things are trending.

blagie 5y ago

That does very directly answer the question of "why." You answered the opposite question: "why not." Neither of us know enough about BM's business model, plans, codebase, etc. to know whether open sourcing makes sense, and if so, how. I trust BM is doing something reasonable here. The only point is that the decision isn't obvious. In terms of 0.00001%, my experience is that bigger businesses care a lot about business continuity. I'm at a large organization, and it's cheaper to buy than build. At the same time, it's lower-risk to buy open-source. That's where things are trending.