Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x70dd | Hacker News Reader

Recently I switched to Ardour for recording guitars on Linux - it has great VST support, allows syncing music with videos, and has automation built-in. Even Amplitube works through LinVst.

I was also blown away by their pricing - you can pay as little as $1 for the full version, which is what I did, but after seeing how well it works, I did a donation to match the recommended price of $45.

View on HN

As far as I remember Ardour is GPL software, and on their website[0] I cannot find neither some kind of licensing price or any donation link. Is there some other commercial version of Ardour?

[0] https://ardour.org/

They do say they're GPL, and let you download the source, but they also say that 1) building from source is hard 2) they won't keep build instructions up to date 3) they won't answer questions about the build process. https://ardour.org/building_linux.html With that attitude I'm not sure why not just buy commercial.

Wow! You need to browse through 4 pages trying to download the program before they ask you for money! I think pay-for-binaries can be a legit monetization strategy for open source, but this is really sneaky.

In a way, you are buying commercial. The Ardour people are selling downloads of their binary builds for $1 per download (or more, if you choose), along with some access to support I think.

It's also possible to, for example, 'apt-get install ardour' and get a similar version in Debian Buster. I presume there are lots of other operating systems that this is built for, so Ardour does make a significant contribution to free software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com