Unless you're interested in a long-winded rant mostly about me and my perspective on LAD in general, skip this one. Otherwise, here goes:
On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 22:31 +0100, Philipp Überbacher wrote: > Excerpts from David Robillard's message of 2011-02-22 22:12:56 +0100: > > --snip-- > > > Put simply: > > > > "I don't care about portability" == "Nobody cares about my software". > > > > -dr > > Simply not true. Maybe not true with blinders on, pretending that this community is actually a significant portion of musicdom and not the tiny niche of nerdery that is really is. How many music events have you been to? At how many did you see Linux being used? How many albums have you listened to? How many were produced with Linux? How many music producers do you know? How many use Linux? For the vaaaaaast majority of music people out there the answers to each of these are "lots" and "almost none" (or "what's Linux?"). Sure, people here obviously care - but people here are an insignificant shred of musicdom, and designing tech exclusively for that insigificant shred of musicdom is... well, insignificant. Maybe you'd consider LAD a success because some bedroom nerd made a bonk he thinks is neat. Fair enough - most of us, myself included, are such bedroom dorks. If, however, you're going to invest a LOT of time into this (like, "dedicate my life to" kind of time), the bar needs to be set a little higher to justify it: I will consider LAD a success when going to a show and seeing it being used isn't an extremely unlikely and noteworthy occurrence like it is now. I want to see/hear Ardour on a regular basis - not Ableton and Logic. I want to see innovation in Ingen on a regular basis - not Max/MSP. I want to see/hear LV2 plugins on a regular basis - not VST and AU. I have no problem describing the current situation where the overwhelming majority of music producers have absolutely no idea what any of this technology even is as "nobody cares". I love Lignux nerdery as much as the next guy who grew up in it, but in the greater world of musicdom, we are, alas, still nobody. Do I personally want to deal with porting things to OSX or Windows? Hell no (though I may start soon, for the reasons below). Is it important to be sure that somebody can, and would it be a good thing if they do? Hell yes. Also, from the perspective of a developer trying to actually support themselves doing this, a handful of bedroom Linux audio nerds do not donate enough to pay the rent ;). Convincing yourself that working exclusively for the handful of nerds on this list is unsustainable (both economically and psychologically). Former LAD developers working in cubes on Enterprise Java do not write LAD software any more :) > I do agree however that portability (==OS independence) > is a good idea for a plugin API. However, we all know that the currently > successful audio plugin APIs are OS dependent. Bingo. LV2 is competing with audio plugin APIs that /are/ portable, and it will never successfully compete with them unless/until it is as well. Lignux will never replace OSX as The music production platform until our plugin technology is at least as capable. A plugin that only works on Lignux is a plugin you're probably never going to hear, is a plugin that nobody cares about. Likewise for the plugin specification itself. The end goal may be to get everyone here, but portability is a necessary step along the way, or they'll just stick with what works. Right now, though it pains me to say it, using Lignux to become a successful producer is like trying to win the Tour de France on a plastic tricycle. We're getting better all the time, which is definitely exciting, but we're still a long way away. Shouldn't we be working to make people care? Shouldn't we be working to make the above a reality, replacing those closed and limiting technologies with open alternatives, liberating artists? I sure think so. I support some are more into programmatic wankery, or convincing themselves they're super cool for running Unix since 1980, or... whatever. Fair enough; enjoy your superior irrelevance. All I know is that we now have real, actual, working plugins with MIDI in/out, GUIs, waveforms, etc. and soon we'll have plugins doing things VST couldn't dream of. Every single solitary line of code put into those improvements to the LAD platform came out of non-hierarchical cooperation of many people, and nobody had to cram anything down anyone else's throat to make it happen. The proof is in the pudding. Of course, the pudding is never perfect. Right now we have a little toolkit compatibility problem in practise, and that's going to be solved with more of the same thing. That same thing that is the entire reason we have a free OS at all - despite the peanut gallery. We'll get there, sooner or later. Help, or - please - get out of the way. Apologies for taking things a bit meta and personal here, but at least it's not a big pathetic ego war :) A little optimism and hope sure as hell isn't going to hurt this place anyway. Anyway, talk is cheap, and at the end of the day the ratio between actual decent work done and amount of time spent irritating people on mailing lists says a lot about any given developer. Mine has taken enough of a dent for one day; I'll get back to that doing thing now. Peace (really), -dr _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev