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Comment by OliverM | Hacker News Reader

I thought Ardour was a commercial product? If you want to download a binary from their site it's either a demo version with injected silence every 10 minutes, or a paid-for option (either a small monthly sub or a larger one-off payment). You can build it locally yourself for free of course, but I don't know if many non-devs would do that.

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It is not really a commercial product, rather it follows an old, but somewhat rare, tradition of making usage slightly more difficult in order to raise funds. OpenBSD used to do the same and not provide pre-built images to raise funds via CD sales from those that could not be bothered to learn how to build images from the source code. You can certainly object to this, but I do find it reasonable as there are few good ways to fund open source software.

As for Ardour itself, it is clearly completely open source [1].

https://git.ardour.org/ardour/ardour/src/branch/master/COPYI...

You're talking about orthogonal concepts.

Ardour is free software (and therefore open source). Ardour is not proprietary software.

Ardour is a commercial product. They sell pre-built binaries, updates (perhaps some level of guarantee/support for those binaries?) etc. Ardour is not "freeware", shareware or a hobby project or anything else like that.

I am not sure it is clear cut as you present it. Clearly Ardour the project is not a commercial product and the same should go for the source code. Arguably the pre-compiled binaries are a commercial product as they are presented to a market for a price (although the same of course does not hold for Ardour binaries provided through package managers and elsewhere). To me, the confusion mostly arises from the fact that we use Ardour to refer to all of the above, while clearly they are all different things.

Ardour certainly looks like a commercial project to me. I think this thinking arises from a couple of misapprehensions, namely:

1. Commerce is bad and somehow at odds with free software and the GPL,

2. The only way to do any kind of software trade is proprietary software.

In fact, commerce is beautiful and a cornerstone of economics and our civilisation. Most people in the free software community are not opposed to commerce. What they are opposed to is proprietary software. That is, claiming ownership of software and therefore doing commerce based mostly on rent-seeking and retaining power over said users. Free software and the GPL aims to disable this, but it does not disable, nor does it oppose, commercial software, unless you believe (2), which is evidently false, as you can see with Ardour.

I am not sure how Ardour would feel about being referred to as a commercial project. But I do suspect if you went back in time and sent an e-mail to misc@ ten years ago calling OpenBSD a commercial project because they sold CDs you would be told to take a hike. I will just agree to disagree on this one. You seem to want to make a bigger point about software and commerce and all I see are shades of grey in that commercialisation is not clear cut and neither is what is a project, its outcomes, etc.

I think GP makes a reasonable point about what commercial actually means. If you are selling something, that's commerce. If the Ardour dev or OpenBSD devs don't like it, then they are free to adopt a euphemism that makes them feel better about it, but that appeal to authority doesn't change the meaning of the term. I think that actually further reinforces GP's point about how the term "commercial software" has become a dirty word.

Now that said, I do support avoiding language that is offensive to people even if it doesn't seem to me like it should be (so long as it's still clear what is being communicated. I don't like Orwellian expressions).

I don't object to it at all, I think it's a great idea. We need more models of supporting open-source, including financial ones. BTW I also don't see commercial and open-source as intrinsically opposed to each other - projects can be both, and I wish more were.

It's also just packaged in Debian which means any distro based on it likely have it.

"Give your stuff away for free to devs" is a pretty good idea for both free and nonfree software. (And Linux users are, for now, still likely to be developer type people than not).

Ardour is very high quality for FOSS. There are many distros that include a free version of Ardour. Ubuntu Studio[1] for instance, and then there are distributions where installing it is an apt-get[2] or yum[3] or whatever[4] away, and paying for it is optional.

[1] https://ubuntustudio.org/2022/11/ardour-7-1-backports-availa...

[2] https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ardour

[3] https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/ardour7/ardour7/

[4] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/ardour/

There's also a distinct commercial DAW based on Ardour called Harrison Mixbus.

https://harrisonconsoles.com/product/mixbus/

> I thought Ardour was a commercial product?

Ardour is licensed under GPLv2.

That is unrelated. Things licensed as open source can still be commercial products. Ardour is open source and can be freely build and distributed, but it's also available as a pre-build product to pay for.

> it's also available as a pre-build product to pay for

Show me where to pay for the pre-built product:

https://community.ardour.org/download?platform=linux&archite...

All I see is a direct download link. If you want to pay that's optional.

Have you pressed that button?

""" Subscribe

$1, $4, $10 or $50 per month ... """

""" Single Payment

If you choose to pay less than US$45 ... """

""" Free/Demo Version

Periodically goes silent after 10 minutes.

No access to nightly (development) builds. """

And, if you wonder, you can't enter 0 for the payment.

Ah I see, so that's what it looks like when you're not using a linux distro to obtain Ardour. And no, I never pressed the button because I just get it through Ubuntu Studio, and I've been using Ardour for years, for my simple (but frequent, multiple times per day) needs whatever version is in there is plenty.

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