Should Studio 13.37 v2 be free? (answered: No)

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l0wt3ch
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Joined: Thu 24 Apr 2014, 01:30

Should Studio 13.37 v2 be free? (answered: No)

#1 Post by l0wt3ch »

Hey everybody. It's me, l0wt3ch. I've put together a new version of Studio 13.37. It's really cool, and I'm pretty excited about it.

But here's the question - should I sell it?

I want to hear your thoughts. Here are mine:

I'd kind of like to release it for free, because it's so awesome I'd like to see as many people as possible use it.

But on the other hand, why abandon a perfectly good online business? I still have unsold usb sticks, a website that gets a bit of traffic, a dedicated YouTube channel, and a support forum. I'd still be free to give away free copies to friends. So why not keep trying? The last version of Studio 13.37 managed to get featured in Recording Magazine. Maybe this time it will go even further, who knows? I could do a lot of good in the world if I had a successful FLOSS-based company. And I think I've figured out how to get around the problems I discussed with you before.

Another thing is, it would be a disaster if nobody ended up using it, and that jerk over at DistroWatch probably won't cover it, so who's going to hear about it? So what's the point of giving it away for free?

Anyway. Please post your thoughts below.

Thanks. :D
Last edited by l0wt3ch on Thu 31 Jul 2014, 03:46, edited 4 times in total.

cthisbear
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Location: Sydney Australia

#2 Post by cthisbear »

Hey mate!.

You and I love to disagree....but!

Sell it.
I would like to see you succeed with this.

You have released plenty of freebies in the past.

You're not making a fortune...I doubt that you've made bugger all.

And you also released your older Studio paid kit here for free.

Enough goodwill....cheers ...Chris.

l0wt3ch
Posts: 182
Joined: Thu 24 Apr 2014, 01:30

#3 Post by l0wt3ch »

Thanks Chris!

Not sure what happened with the poll, and the duplicate options. I've PM'ed Flash; maybe he can fix it.

starhawk
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#4 Post by starhawk »

I don't believe Linux should be sold.

I can sort of see selling tech support along side Linux... but when you blur the lines, or make Linux an actual product (charging money for the distro/release/etc itself) you're doing everyone a disservice, in my opinion.

Remember that Linux is about freedom. There wouldn't be a Linux still, I think, if it weren't about freedom. That's what sets us apart -- the idea that we are in charge of our software, not anyone else anywhere else. We are all devs and we are all users -- all at once. If you're using something and you find a bug, you're supposed to report it. That's how you "pay" for using it -- you help improve it if you can see a way, however small -- even if it's by complaining about missing or broken functionality.

When you insert money into that, the whole system self-destructs -- because -- aside from the fact that you're now paying for the software twice -- you inherently are regulating who can and cannot use that software. You CANNOT have a pay-for distro that everyone can use wherever they want however they want whoever they are. The two are irrevocably and unalterably mutually exclusive. Your customers have to pay to use your distro, and no matter how low you set the bar: someone, somewhere, will not be able to pay up, and right then and there you just lost the OS war completely.

Why do I say that last part? That you just lost the OS war? Because it's true. The one big thing about Linux, that's true of all Linuces (except the ones that have lost the OS war already) -- the Grand Unifying Theory Of Linux is that bit about freedom -- anyone can use it, anywhere, any (legit) way, period. (Obviously we don't condone illegal stuff here! But neither does MS, so it's sort of beside the point.) If you start restricting access to your Linux -- if you make a not-free Linux distro -- you are not any better than Microsoft or Apple (well, their OS side, anyhow) at that point. You're just another guy with another all-proprietary OS that's charging way too much for their product.

Having tossed my $0.02 into the pool, I'll step down off the soapbox and give someone else a turn.

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8-bit
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#5 Post by 8-bit »

With the talk about linux Oses being free, I see that some are not.
And even though Studio may have Puppy as the underlying base, could it be designed as an add on application that one could use on any version of Linux; not just Puppy.
Designed as an app that could be used on any OS would help in marketability and also satisfy those that would like to buy and use it. But do not want to switch to another OS to be able to do so.
In the end, it is the developer's choice in if they decide to sell it or not.
And I would not worry about using some open source with it as even OSes that one has to purchase include some open source software in their releases.

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RSH
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#6 Post by RSH »

Sell it!

If you don't want to have this used just as another ISO in a user's Puppy collection.

Also, it isn't just the OS that would be sold. It comes pre-installed on a usb-flash drive, so no download needed, no need to buy an extra usb-flash drive and no need to make installation at your own.

Should be worth some money...

Good luck,

RSH

Btw.: the poll is gone. Could not vote.
[b][url=http://lazy-puppy.weebly.com]LazY Puppy[/url][/b]
[b][url=http://rshs-dna.weebly.com]RSH's DNA[/url][/b]
[url=http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=91422][b]SARA B.[/b][/url]

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puppyluvr
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#7 Post by puppyluvr »

:D Hello,
You know where I stand.
If you are you.
Idk why, but I have some doubt.
Just a feeling...
I'm even on the dentists site.
So who am I l0wt3ch?
Close the Windows, and open your eyes, to a whole new world
I am Lead Dog of the
Puppy Linux Users Group on Facebook
Join us!

Puppy since 2.15CE...

ciento
Posts: 181
Joined: Sat 18 Sep 2010, 02:53

#8 Post by ciento »

I would stay commercial, let people use the old one
like a working demo or lite version, as many windows devs do.

After i/o in several discussions, I don't think people will respect your
work, if it is given away. People may like and praise something,
but respect seems to start at the wallet. The most popular dev
I can point to, Urs Heckman, of U-he Zebra/Diva fame,
has a mix of world-class products with afforable prices, along with several great free releases.
I get the impression that his popularity comes from
a consistant forum presence, where brevity is the essence of wit,
coupled with active product support.

I'd make sure Bitwig support gets high priority. It's installer
places the important things in /opt/bitwig-studio, and also creates
a .bitwig and /home/you/bitwig folders, to hold scripts, presets, and native linux vsts (which work well.)

Several skilled linux users have greatly expanded
use of the bitwig linux version. Even a new windows-vst bridge,
is getting a lot of work.

Sourcing some nice recycled i5 laptops, to preinstall your Studio on,
might work at some point, as long as you didn't need to buy
in 1000 part lots to get a great price.
Hope to $ee the new release make some .wavs!
Cheers

ciento
Posts: 181
Joined: Sat 18 Sep 2010, 02:53

#9 Post by ciento »

starhawk wrote:I don't believe Linux should be sold.
What "we" use as linux, is crumbs brushed off the board-room tables
of Fortune 500 mega-corporations. Used underwear and socks.
Nothing more.

cthisbear
Posts: 4422
Joined: Sun 29 Jan 2006, 22:07
Location: Sydney Australia

#10 Post by cthisbear »

" I'm even on the dentists site. "

"""""""""

Rumour has it that l0wt3ch is making a Combo release
named Chopin.

You sits in the dental chair and relax to the melodies
while the dentist uses Announcers' older software to scan your teeth
for cavities.

Ah! technology...Chris.

mcewanw
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#11 Post by mcewanw »

Well I guess the components are GPL'd or similar, or most of them anyway, or someone else holds the license to any commercial software. The GPL allows you to sell your creation as long as you can also provide the sourcecode, which goes for most any of these Opensource licences. However, anyone who pays for it, according to the GPL can then host it for free, which is why trying to sell opensource software never really works out I think. Otherwise, I would say, sure, sell it, why is it that open source developers thousands of hours aren't worth a dime - just they aren't that's all...

And yes, it's true, we stand on the shoulders of giants always in the open source community, and what we add to that community is I suppose just a contribution, which we can choose to make or not make.

I've always felt that open source GPL type software keeps a lot of people out of a job, whereas Microsoft and so on provide employment for thousands of people, not that I otherwise feel positively towards Microsoft or similar. Programmers generally only make money if they work commercially and most often that would be on a commercial platform (though there are a few exceptions, I know).

William (an unemployed software/electronics engineer)
github mcewanw

l0wt3ch
Posts: 182
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#12 Post by l0wt3ch »

Sorry about the poll, Flash deleted it. Have to do this with posts, I guess..

Thanks for the comments. Keep em coming!

EDIT: It's me, Flash can confirm! The Studio 13.37 email address is on file.

stemsee

#13 Post by stemsee »

Hi I0wt3ch

It's me the guy from England with the touchscreen problem. I bought your product and then you updated and I persuaded you to send me the update, which you did on another usb stick free of charge! I sold the first one one at no loss!! Your distro is a master piece! I wasted weeks, nay months trying to acheive similar results ... so I didn't mind paying! I would probably buy the latest one too if the updates satisfy my requirements. It is your distro and artistx which inspired me to develope my own, primarily because even your product uses old kernels and no frequent updates. Also I don't understand the glory of slackware! Give me ubuntu based dists any old day of the week!!! Whether i think your pricing is fair or not doesn't even matter, but I do think that you need to upgrade the usb dongles you are issuing. Now a 16gb dongle costs very little. I offered my own distro on sandisk cruzer extreme 16 Gb 256mb/s usb 3.0 which cost £20 a hit and add £2.00 for my efforts. That way I am selling-on a product, usb 3.0 stick with a great distro almost free thrown in. I notice that your site has an upped price of $75 !!

I wish you luck with selling your product and fruit of your skills; has anyone else tried to compile an aufs enabled RT kernel?? That is a brain "£$%&* right there! And your support is good too.

My advice is sell or sell specific features, but upgrade the hardware, and upgrade kernels more frequently. Make the older distros available through the forum and donate heavily to the development of software you include, like Ardour, Hydrogen, Jamin, Jack Audio, etc

Marcos

EDIT: but give me a free copy first! ;-)

l0wt3ch
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#14 Post by l0wt3ch »

Hi Marcos, nice to talk to you again.

I've essentially been experimenting the last couple months with selling the same software on my site that I have already given away for free here. Hasn't really worked out though. :)

My kernels are often updated, but I don't advertise it because there's no easy way to upgrade, and the kernel it came with at purchase time will work on the computers the customer owned at purchase time, too.

Thanks again for supporting 13.37, and good luck with your own distro. :)
Last edited by l0wt3ch on Wed 23 Jul 2014, 00:24, edited 1 time in total.

ciento
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#15 Post by ciento »

mcewanw wrote: I've always felt that open source GPL type software keeps a lot of people out of a job, whereas Microsoft and so on provide employment for thousands of people, not that I otherwise feel positively towards Microsoft or similar.
William (an unemployed software/electronics engineer)
Microsoft just announced last week, proposed layoffs of 18,000.
(that should wake up the coders!)

I think the crashed economy is catching up with companies
that scated for years on profits that were greater than the
worth of the product. Companies are shedding dead weight,
and the survivors are picking up the slack, in survival mode, to keep
their employers in the black.

If it ain't happenin' in NZ, a few years in Texas may worth considering.
Low taxes, tons of jobs, great bar-b-que, and hot cowgirls!

stemsee

#16 Post by stemsee »

@ciento

I think you will find that the majority of the 18,000 to be laid off are from microsoft's new purchase, Nokia company!

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matiasbatero
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#17 Post by matiasbatero »

Hi Lowtech,

It's difficult to make money with opensource selling products, opensource world have their business selling support. There are some aspects for that Studio 13.37 should be free. But there are other factors for that Studio should not be free.

In my opinion, your knowledge is your single source to make money. And i think that people should pay for that, if not, you are devaluing your work.

The important part is, be honest with yourself and recognizes the value of your work and compare it with other projects made by the same effort. If quality and work are approximately similar looking some parameters, and these available projects are free, so your soft should be free too.

Remember: "Evaluate software in money terms is Difficult, Very difficult due their invisibility"

You can ask for some "parameters".. analyze some aspects..Ex:

-Relation beetween number of developers/contribuitors and amount of work done.
-Human resources. ex: ¿Is comparable the knowledge to build the specific characteristics of Studio13.37, with another software.. for ex: Ardour?
-Quality. Difficult to evaluate, but you can do it looking code quality for example.
-Methodology: structure of work, Professionalism.
-Technical: Ex: "Design of GUI for utilities are not equal to the Core, it have value of course, but is not comparable."
-¿Your work is based from other? etc..

At the end of analysis: If there are projects comparable, and some of these are Free. Your soft should be free. If there no comparison, you need to make money with your work.


Some reasons to your favor to make money:
-Your kernel modification seems to get best results to other modifications. And maybe this is for you knowledge.
-Low Latency, is a specific feature (On linux).


Some reasons to be free:
-Kernel modification its very important, but all distro works thanks to
Jack core. Jack is so fundamental and indispensable to work with audio on linux. Without jack, no audio. And Jack is free and opensource.

-All the "linux audio ecosystem" is free and opensource. A lot of software were made with this concept, and projects like yours. can allow to generate more software with better quality. At least, all your work is made to work with free/opensource.

In my humble opinion, i think that Studio 13.37v2 should be free, at least for now.

-Source code available.
-Make money promoting donations.
-Sell your work if you want only in Binary Format.
-Sell support (always)

If your project increases in value with the time. You can work with a team, and make second step.

-Sell binary with latest updates and more special features (Price 1)
-Sell binary with current version features (Price 2)

If Value tends to be very high, and you have a family of products.
And these products are comparable to commercial products.

-> Propietary Software.

---
Your decision defines all. All depends also in your personal interests.
If you have perspectives, what type of perspectives, or some vision.

Sometimes, but it this cases, is better to open a project with the community and open the possibility of grow... sometimes, the benefits for a lot of users is more big that personal benefit. Bet in Free Software world with "propietary aproach" is very difficult and a real challenge. This is not the market for these concept of marketing, 90/95% of software based in that model, unfortunately fall in time and not getting off.

Propietary Multi-Platform specific software, is much more to make money. But this is another topic..

Regards, and sorry for my english.
I hope you have been useful my opinion!

Matías. G.

l0wt3ch
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#18 Post by l0wt3ch »

Big shout out to ciento, Jayguitarman, RSH, cthisbear, and the others!

One of the reasons I'm considering giving it away for free is that I remember the good old days, when many thousands of people downloaded earlier versions of my work. For instance, before I set up my own website and turned Studio into a product, Softpedia had downloads for 3.1 at over 3000, and that was a very small percentage of the total - most of the downloads were from Russoodle's server, where (she says) there was a huge amount of traffic from people downloading Studio. I don't know how many users I had, but it was a lot. Sometimes I regret all the BS that went down and wish it could just go back to the way things were before.

Unfortunately, I'm not even sure that giving v2 away for free would generate enough word of mouth to result in that many downloads. In my opinion, the Linux scene sucks now, mostly because all of the channels we used to rely on for information have either stagnated or been sold to corporate interests. Distrowatch's website looks like it's from the 90s, and the owner is a grumpy old man who honestly couldn't care less about 90% of the new distros out there, and hasn't since Ubuntu remixes became a thing ten years ago. He's just going through the motions. Slashdot lost some of their cool editors, and was bought by a job advertising company, Dice Holdings, along with SourceForge!

So I dunno. You guys have almost talked me into selling it, but there's a big part of me that just wants everybody to use it and enjoy Linux. :)

l0wt3ch
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#19 Post by l0wt3ch »

matiasbatero wrote:-Kernel modification its very important, but all distro works thanks to Jack core. Jack is so fundamental and indispensable to work with audio on linux. Without jack, no audio. And Jack is free and opensource.

-All the "linux audio ecosystem" is free and opensource. A lot of software were made with this concept, and projects like yours. can allow to generate more software with better quality.
Thanks for your input.

But if I created a brand that made money (say, by taking market share from these guys) couldn't I help financially support upstream projects which are currently struggling?

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matiasbatero
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Location: Mar del Plata, Argentina

#20 Post by matiasbatero »

l0wt3ch wrote:But if I created a brand that made money (say, by taking market share from these guys) couldn't I help financially support upstream projects which are currently struggling?
Yes, of course. You can help with money! In that way, its fine. All is allowed in order to help. My response was oriented in terms of (Privative vs OpenSource) model. I thought that your decision was oriented to that, perspectives, vision etc like "build a product and make money with it" or "donate" or "freeware". By the way, was a general opinion. By my side, i don't know if your project gives you a good rentability and how many users you have. Hope so!

Your project will be OpenSource? or only Privative?

Regards.

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