Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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Because I have personal experience of being completely shafted by software companies. In a past life I was a music technology geek. Recording engineers spend huge amounts of time, effort and money on learning our preferred Digital Audio Workstation software, which has come to replace almost every piece of equipment in a modern recording studio. Think of it as the audio equivalent of Photoshop, but with half a dozen competing alternatives. It's the kind of software you go on training courses for, the kind that comes in a huge box to make you feel like you're getting your money's worth, the kind that has multi-thousand dollar plugins available. The market leader, DigiDesign Pro Tools, only works with DigiDesign's proprietary hardware, which can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Two major upheavals shafted a lot of audio engineers.

One of the most popular DAW suites is a package called Logic. After nearly twenty years of development, Emagic sold out to Apple and Apple decided to abandon the PC version. Suddenly guys who had used the same piece of software all day every day for a decade or more were faced with either buying at least one top-end Mac, having to learn to use OS X and potentially a whole bunch of other software, or abandon their preferred DAW and have to relearn how to do their work in a different DAW. Either option would prove enormously expensive for a lot of engineers, both in direct costs and lost work.

When Apple shifted over to Intel, there was a huge lag from many developers in getting updates released. For engineers, this is a serious problem - having the fastest hardware and the latest software is a significant competitive advantage. A lot of people lost out on work, or had to buy PCs or new audio hardware.

The experience of that world has led to my current position. Professionals in all sorts of disciplines have huge personal investments in particular software and are often completely betrayed by the developers. EULAs are a one-way street and only the most rarified of enterprise software has any sort of reciprocal commitment. What Stallman talks about isn't purely abstract. Relying on proprietary software is dangerous, for very straightforward practical reasons.

Those of us who have been around in the software industry for a while usually have some experience of being shafted, or left high and dry, by a particular software product or company. The most pernicious activity that I've seen is the "pay us for this upgrade which you don't really want or need or else we disable your software" business model. It's not explicitly expressed in those terms of course, but that's what it amounts to. Another problem which I've come across is the situation where a software company disappears and there are outstanding bugs which can't be fixed by anyone. Sometimes the ownership rights mean that even ex-developers from a defunct software company can't independently continue to support software which they wrote.

Music/recording has been an unusually competitive software market for some time now. Unlike, say, the situation with Photoshop, one can name dozens of products that have been releasing updates regularly for decades on end, because of exactly this kind of lock-in and a seemingly unending need for more features, more sounds and effects (and higher quality ones) and more hardware support.

Trying to get into the commercial software packages as an amateur, one gets this sinking feeling of, "oh my god, there's too much stuff to maintain." Installers for every little plugin you come across, some of them using dongles, others using serials, some a tiny sub-megabyte download, others being dozens of gigabytes in samples or loops. And then you have to think about the handy presets and effects chains, hardware setups for different situations...and then a learning curve for everything, even in mostly-similar situations. It essentially becomes impossible to restore a project from an earlier setup, other than to salvage raw audio and MIDI.

I can see why a lot of people still put their stock in hardware even today; the product cycles are longer and the hardware isn't going to "disappear into the ether" so easily.

However, I also think that open source is going to gradually gain an advantage here because, once developed, it can remain stable, well-integrated, and easy to install in ways that the commercial packages can't. It hasn't hit the point where you can adequately point to equivalents for all studio functions, and it probably won't do so for some years to come, because of the extremely slow development of UI polish, new features in existing software, and API standardization. The Linux audio distributions today are still embarrassingly cumbersome to work with. But it's possible to envision a day where it all works together and has some form of healthy relationship with the commercial market.

From information found around the web it sounds like you are stretching the truth a little bit.

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Pro), Emagic and Logic weren't around until the 90's, even though Logic was based on ideas from previous software. It's stated there that Emagic and Logic, as software named "Logic" didn't exist until '93. Then Emagic was acquired by Apple in 2002 at which point the Windows version was discontinued. The information there, if factual, would mean that Logic was only being developed by Emagic for about 10 years before they were acquired by Apple.

Information here implies (http://www.tweakheadz.com/history_of_notator_and_logic3.html) that the Mac version came in '93 followed by the PC/Windows version in '95 or '96 which would mean that Logic wasn't being used on PC/Windows for more than 6 or 7 years or so before the Windows version was discontinued by Apple. Logic and all the previous software whose ideas it was based on were also originally on Atari.

My apologies if it seems that I have misrepresented anything, I was giving numbers from memory. I'm not a Logic user myself. Even assuming that no Logic users upgraded from the Atari ST to the PC, I think the point still stands that six or seven years is a long time to sit in front of the same piece of software. It's a heck of a lot of "continuing professional development", of setup tweaks and hacks and workarounds and little bits of expertise.

The extent to which those skills accumulate is highlighted by the fact that "Pro Tools Operator" is a job title in the industry, and that their pay varies more widely than that of session musicians. Using a DAW isn't just a secondary task, like a writer uses a word processor - at the high end, operating a DAW is a job in itself. People have built whole careers simply off the back of being very quick at piloting Pro Tools. Being told that your DAW is being discontinued is a bit like being told that all your old electric guitars are obsolete and won't work with new amplifiers. It's vaguely tolerable if you're a hobbyist or an artist who can afford to be fussy about their kit, but if you're a professional who needs to get the job done every time, it's a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Wouldn't the software continue to work on PCs, or did Apple have a way to remotely kill every copy? If not, why was it any more of an issue than if it were open source and the developer abandoned it?

In other words, what happened to make the software that you were running for 10 years suddenly cease to be useful?

Some people sleep better knowing the "abandoned" software can always be taken up by other developers, because it's open source.

Others sleep better knowing there's a company with a financial incentive to keep the product alive.

Honestly, either way, I don't see where morality enters the equation. It's not wrong to release software that's closed-source, it's your choice as a developer. It's not wrong to give up some of your freedom, it's your choice as a consumer.

For example, do you think the users might have considered it a bit of a risk continuing to use software they knew there would be no bug fixes for?

You're fine until you upgrade your hardware, or install a new plugin, or need to import a new file type. You end up in the same predicament as people still using IE6 - the software is as good or bad as it was when it was still being supported, but the rest of the world has moved on around you. Beyond that, in most industries there is constant competitive pressure to be using the latest, most powerful tools. If you don't have an upgrade path, your setup falls further and further behind your competitors. The recent fashion for overt Autotune is a good example - in a relatively short space of time it has gone from being a relatively unusual effect to being de rigeur in some genres. If you can't keep up with those trends, you're going to lose work.

The outstanding question though is that in this type of case, high-end domain specific software, the pure open source model tends not to produce the ultra-high end software. The reason, though it seems to mystify many open source advocates, is that it takes lots of money to make a unique or novel thing on time spans of less than a decade...and the only way to recoup those costs is by selling that thing at some price and keeping the IP closed. Multi-thousand dollar plugins are one example.

In other words, going open source in this type of sense means that you won't have the latest and greatest anyway. So your particular case example doesn't change things.

Doesn't explain why the software couldn't revert to Open Source once that company goes defunct. If I were running a large company, I would think about asking for such terms.

It happens all the time.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code_escrow

It's actually really nice when it happens. There are cases though where the source code does not actually compile into the complete product, typically where lots of third party components are licensed in.

"Completely shafted" seems a bit strong. There's no contract that says you have to keep updating an application forever, can never sell the company/app to anybody, or have to maintain all hardware implementations for eternity. If there were it would be much more expensive. They took an economic decision that made sense for their employees and shareholders - to do otherwise would be shafting them. You can still use what you had used for X years - it just won't be improved. If it had so many years of work then it's likely still useful. Compare that to hardware, which needs updating every couple years (like my screen, which died yesterday).

The alternative is that Visicalc, or Deluxe Paint for Amiga continue to be updated forever. I wouldn't invest in that business, and I'd hate to be a developer there.

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