Free vs. commercial, perspectives from the music software industry
In my hobby time, I like to make electronic music. A piece of software I’ve been using for ages now is called Ableton Live. They’ve just released a new version which integrates Max/MSP/Jitter, which itself is a visual programming environment for making new electronic synths, controlling video via Jitter, … the list goes on. There’s a highly active open source community of users of Max who exchange Max patches and thus share their home brew synths, interface to a custom music controller, etc.
This integration is extremely cool in ways I can’t get into in this post, but what I thought interesting for this audience was this discussion around open source v.s. commercial software (my bolding):
It’s not such fantastic news for the open source world or competing tools, because this is a very proprietary and vendor-specific solution. That’s not a criticism, just an observation – I know fantastic people and friends who are supported by the business model that’s here. But it is worth noting, because I believe healthy software ecosystems incorporate both free and commercial models, and fully open and fully “integrated” (which are sometimes more closed) solutions.
That said, I think it’s still an opportunity for open source alternatives to differentiate themselves, and for the two to coexist harmoniously.
Sound familiar? You could take that paragraph and use it to describe Eclipse.
We’ve been saying these words around commercial vs. free (commercial plus free!) from the beginning. Sometimes people mistakenly believe that open source just means free software. I’m very proud of Eclipse, and while I take my role in the community quite seriously and really enjoy it, I don’t write free Eclipse software to be nice. I do it because it helps to build a healthy and dynamic ecosystem whereby everyone can benefit, and to the degree I can be successful at that, my employer can produce value-add commercial products and pay me to do it. Eveyone wins, but only if everyone provides value in some form (free or not).
Posted January 22nd, 2009 by Kevin McGuire in category: Open Source
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4 Responses to “Free vs. commercial, perspectives from the music software industry”
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Chris Aniszczyk Says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I had no idea Kevin…
Why don’t you share some of your creations ;)?
Zsolt Says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 1:17 pm
It’s good to see a fellow Ableton Live fan in the Eclipse community! I’m amazed by their latest announcements, there are some innovative thinkers at Ableton.
Chris Aniszczyk Says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Come on Kevin, don’t be shy. We need to get you on MySpace and on your way to stardom!
Kevin McGuire Says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:09 pm
@Chris, I’m a good starter but terrible finisher
Here’s some some stuff I did ages ago. McQ has produced some songs I collaborated on, I need to link those in too.
@Zsolt, I agree, I think the guys at Ableton are brilliant. I think the new Live defines a new genre of “Music IDE”.