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>So open source is only for people who are already wealthy enough to not need to make money In practice, yeah. Counts for me: I inherited enough money to devel
by Applejinx 3y ago
>So open source is only for people who are already wealthy enough to not need to make money
In practice, yeah. Counts for me: I inherited enough money to develop the world around my open-source work, though I began that work while I was still extremely poor.
Understand that what 'need to make money' means to a Silicon Valley tech bro, is one hell of a lot different than what it would mean to a normal person. If you live in a place where the cost of living isn't impossibly brutal, if you are willing to accept that if you get sick you'll die unless you are lucky enough that government healthcare comes through for you, if you're prepared to leave nothing behind you (like a Terry Pratchett wizard, dying drunk, happy and owing vast sums of money), then there is much less stopping you from getting into open source.
It's a bit like the music business, really (which I also work in, by virtue of my project). If you can afford to persistently do the work, you get to live the life and in the long run, be the guy who's done the work, to whatever degree of recognition that gets you. I know numerous sound engineers who've blown a fair bit of money doing it, and have no great financial security, but they were in the room when the magic happened, and when the echoes die away in the live room that's what they cared about.
When you die, your bank account is just numbers. I suppose you might want to arrange that it then does something. You could also do something while you're alive, and be there to see it.
Making wealth for individuals isn't in the equation… except when they're predatory vampires there to suck wealth FROM those who do the work. Being in the music business naturally I know about those stories. I'm given to understand this happens in Silicon Valley, and open source, too ;)
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoWhat's your project?
- Applejinx 3y agoI'm Chris from Airwindows. I've recently done a bunch of work on extending what's possible in slew clipping and slew softclipping, and I'm about to do my level best to provide legit big-analog-console sounds ITB as open source free software: that is through minimal but unorthodox DSP to target the end state of the sound rather than putting up GUIs and then using traditional DSP to imitate every last analog step in the process. A recent milestone is Console Zero https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDAZTEUtSpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDAZTEUtSpk which is a bit of a radical experiment in applying only such mathematical calculations that preserve the mantissa of the floating-point value being worked on (where possible). This led to a 'switched' panner with a completely different (or absent!) pan law, in which every pan position retains the mantissa of the audio word, for an LCR-like effect where you also get a mid-right and mid-left position plus a whole array of increasingly hard-panned positions. baconpaul from the Surge Synth project has helped me extend my codebase to things like VCV Rack support and is generally pleased with the relentless consistency of my code library (especially the VST2s which are all stereo and have no control variation beyond 0-1 inputs) and my ability to write notes and descriptions in such a way that he can write code to parse that and do things like bring all the plugins, INCLUDING what documentation they have, into a single package via elaborate scripting. As a rule I put out a new open-source plugin under the MIT license every week. I am paid a bit over minimum wage by my Patreon, and if I didn't need or want to get studio gear to use and study, that would cover my cost of living handily :)
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoHey Chris. Interesting HN nick :) Happy to be a Patreon supporter.
- Applejinx 3y ago…wow. How'd you sneak in without me noticing? I'm far from a Paul Davis, but if there's anything you'd like, let me know. Worst that can happen is I'll go 'I have no idea how to code that' :)