donation-ware vs. FOSS
Posted: Sat Nov 16, 2013 11:23 pm
I was in IT for over a decade and then I did my own business for 7 years. I'm burned out from all that stuff, so I'm just focusing on becoming a musician. However I'm finding myself getting sucked back into code because I want things to work a certain way. And I realize that I really love writing code enough that my focus lately has been trying to do both and find some sort of balance.
Money isn't my focus; I'm more fulfilled just if people like what I do and what I offer. However, I'm not really sure that as an individual it makes sense to giving away the source code to what I do. I want to maintain that proprietary thing, and just give the binaries away free.
The reason being is that I had over $2 million stolen from me so I know from experience that licenses and contracts mean jack if you don't have the financial backing to sue someone with really deep pockets to enforce them.
If I do donation-ware then if people appreciate it they can contribute something, maybe some kind of indiegogo-type approach where I can list out some big thing of features and let people pledge towards what new things they want and if it hits a certain amount of pledges then I'll add that as an upgrade and give that away free...I think codeweavers used to do something that at one point in time, to debug their fork of wine to work with certain softwares that people cared about.
At this point in time I have enough annuity income to where my bills are paid. I have a nice computer now and a couple midi keyboards and a decent mic. But beyond that I'm completely broke; I'm not motivated enough by money to work a day job.
I love Linux but I find myself banging my head against the wall too much to where it's hard for me to get a good musical workflow. I used Xubuntu exclusively for almost 2 years but then I got back into Windows recently because I want to do professional music production. When I just load up FL Studio and Synthmaster on Windows and get to work then I can actually get stuff done. Also I'm in a learning mode now and I have all these courses on music production and it's a lot easier to just be able to install some demo vst on windows and fiddle with it to take the class then it is to screw around with PlayOnLinux and hope that I can get something working at a minimal level.
Right now I'm taking this ChucK programming course and I really like a lot of what I'm learning. I'm finding it more intuitive to figure out sound design type stuff by looking at code than by fiddling with knobs on a synth and trying to intuitively figure out what is actually going on.
I do like cross-platform stuff but it seems like the only thing that is really useful for cross-platform gui apps that doesn't cost a bunch of money is Qt Creator. So I guess I need to learn c++ at some point to do that.
I get the whole FSF ideology, it's just not really my ideology. I also get the Microsoft ideology. My buddy who works there is hard-core trying to recruit me, but I won't want to work for a big corporation either. I feel like I'm stuck somewhere in between those ideologies. I want as many people as possible to benefit from my work, and I want to make it as free as possible. But I'm not super comfortable with giving away the source code. For now I'm just thinking donation-ware is the way to go. I also have no problem with people downloading my music for free, and doing whatever with it as long as I get attribution, but I don't want them claiming it as their own and selling it or whatever. I like some of the stuff that creative commons does, but I'm not sure how easy it is for a broke person to enforce when these big RIAA-signed artists are doing things like appropriating artwork from someone's deviant art profile and turning it into an album cover and then the person who made the art not having the financial resources to do much about it.
So I guess my philosophy with money is that it's nice to have, but not nice enough to make it my focus for 40+ hours a week. And if I'm putting 20 or 30 hours a week into writing up a bunch of free software it would be nice to work my way up to making a couple hundred bucks a month from donations trickling in it without feeling overly obligated to add new features like I would if some customer is paying the bills. But if someone likes an aspect of what I'm doing I'm not really comfortable with them appropriating my code for commercial purposes...if they want that then they can contact me to negotiate something.
Money isn't my focus; I'm more fulfilled just if people like what I do and what I offer. However, I'm not really sure that as an individual it makes sense to giving away the source code to what I do. I want to maintain that proprietary thing, and just give the binaries away free.
The reason being is that I had over $2 million stolen from me so I know from experience that licenses and contracts mean jack if you don't have the financial backing to sue someone with really deep pockets to enforce them.
If I do donation-ware then if people appreciate it they can contribute something, maybe some kind of indiegogo-type approach where I can list out some big thing of features and let people pledge towards what new things they want and if it hits a certain amount of pledges then I'll add that as an upgrade and give that away free...I think codeweavers used to do something that at one point in time, to debug their fork of wine to work with certain softwares that people cared about.
At this point in time I have enough annuity income to where my bills are paid. I have a nice computer now and a couple midi keyboards and a decent mic. But beyond that I'm completely broke; I'm not motivated enough by money to work a day job.
I love Linux but I find myself banging my head against the wall too much to where it's hard for me to get a good musical workflow. I used Xubuntu exclusively for almost 2 years but then I got back into Windows recently because I want to do professional music production. When I just load up FL Studio and Synthmaster on Windows and get to work then I can actually get stuff done. Also I'm in a learning mode now and I have all these courses on music production and it's a lot easier to just be able to install some demo vst on windows and fiddle with it to take the class then it is to screw around with PlayOnLinux and hope that I can get something working at a minimal level.
Right now I'm taking this ChucK programming course and I really like a lot of what I'm learning. I'm finding it more intuitive to figure out sound design type stuff by looking at code than by fiddling with knobs on a synth and trying to intuitively figure out what is actually going on.
I do like cross-platform stuff but it seems like the only thing that is really useful for cross-platform gui apps that doesn't cost a bunch of money is Qt Creator. So I guess I need to learn c++ at some point to do that.
I get the whole FSF ideology, it's just not really my ideology. I also get the Microsoft ideology. My buddy who works there is hard-core trying to recruit me, but I won't want to work for a big corporation either. I feel like I'm stuck somewhere in between those ideologies. I want as many people as possible to benefit from my work, and I want to make it as free as possible. But I'm not super comfortable with giving away the source code. For now I'm just thinking donation-ware is the way to go. I also have no problem with people downloading my music for free, and doing whatever with it as long as I get attribution, but I don't want them claiming it as their own and selling it or whatever. I like some of the stuff that creative commons does, but I'm not sure how easy it is for a broke person to enforce when these big RIAA-signed artists are doing things like appropriating artwork from someone's deviant art profile and turning it into an album cover and then the person who made the art not having the financial resources to do much about it.
So I guess my philosophy with money is that it's nice to have, but not nice enough to make it my focus for 40+ hours a week. And if I'm putting 20 or 30 hours a week into writing up a bunch of free software it would be nice to work my way up to making a couple hundred bucks a month from donations trickling in it without feeling overly obligated to add new features like I would if some customer is paying the bills. But if someone likes an aspect of what I'm doing I'm not really comfortable with them appropriating my code for commercial purposes...if they want that then they can contact me to negotiate something.