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There is something wrong in the state of Open Source

The source code for our Open Sound System product was “open sourced” under GPLv2 and CDDL about three months ago. There were several reasons why we did so.

  1. Third party driver developers can contribute their changes to the common OSS source tree.
  2. We wanted to give our customers a guarantee that they can keep using OSS even 4Front Technologies goes out of business.
  3. By having the source code our customers can customize the code for their purposes.
  4. When large number of developers can see the source code they may find bugs that might otherwise stay undetected for years.
  5. We wanted to make OSS as an acceptable sound subsystem solution for all Unix/Linux/POSIX/whatever compatible operating systems.
  6. We wanted to promote an open source software concept where everybody who uses open source software from other companies/developers also contribute their own development to the community.
  7. We wanted to do all the above in a way that makes it possible to us to continue our work as professional software developers.
  8. We wanted to continue to sell OSS as a commercial product to the customers who want to use OSS from their proprietary/inhouse software.

We decided to release the source code of OSS under two commonly used open source licenses that were GPLv2 and CDDL. We would have preferred just one license scheme but out of all ones these two provided widest coverage of the open source software market. These two licenses are compatible with all the different “open source” licenses so far. We didn’t release OSS under licenses like BSD because we feel they are “half closed source” licenses.

Did this licensing model work? The answer is yes and no. The success story is that we have already got several talented developers to contribute their work back to OSS. What was disappointing is that open sourcing actually decreased our sales significantly. We are in unfortunate position of providing only device drivers that are supposed to be free.

So for us open sourcing means kissing goodbye to any hope of revenue. The customers who previously bought OSS licenses don’t do it any more. They think that having the source code means that they have at least equal rights than we had.

So what can we do? Developing OSS is no longer profitable which means we should find some other way to feed our families. Who will then continue developing OSS for you?

You may thing we could start selling OSS T-shirts to fund the development. Do you have ever bought any T-shirts to sponsor some open source project? At least I have never done so.

I tried to add some Google ads to our open source WEB pages and to the OSS Programmer’s Guide (which have about 2000 hits/day). In two weeks I have got exactly $00.00 in that way.

So does anybody have better ideas?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

103 Responses to “There is something wrong in the state of Open Source”

  1. tmp0000 Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 3:06 am

    I think you can do it more, more earlier.

    There is no OSS in linux anymore. There is ALSA.

  2. vasiuka Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 3:10 am

    it is very strange that you got nothng with google ads.

  3. vasiuka Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 3:12 am

    may be you will be able to find some sponsor?

    many open source projects gets funds from big corporations which are interested in those development.

  4. baba zina Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 3:18 am

    Integrate with ALSA

  5. Denis Smirnov Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 3:23 am

    In opensource world you can’t get money for things that _done_, only for things that you _do now_.

    In Linux world OSS is dead. But in Solaris/FreeBSD/etc not.

    You can get bounty for porting some of your code from OSS to ALSA.

  6. Aceler Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 3:27 am

    > So does anybody have better ideas?

    Let Red Hat acquires you.

  7. Vitaly Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 4:09 am

    As I understand You situation You need embed You software in some hardware and sell complete solution instead pure drivers.

    I propose You build a sound effect processor based on linux+oss+alsalib+ladspa and sell it. It will be very flexible solution and will be have a buyers.

    I have some ideas and expirience in implementation something similar.

    With best regards Vitaly V. Chernookiy

  8. kaafree Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 4:13 am

    Fix bugs for money

  9. fdn Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 5:10 am

    ALSA kill OSS.

    To late product was “open sourced” under GPL.

  10. Valera Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 7:11 am

    Hello
    If you know there is Linux distro named DSLLinux.
    Thes is OpenSourse project, but they can catch money from it’s project :)
    You can learning and may be asking for help :)

    I think Linux power in variety, but sometime there are no future for many project’s, and it’s mine that humans loss time for nothing.

    If I don’t read news about OSS is free I will never knew about this system :)

    Can you tolk with comunity/developers of ALSA project (http://www.alsa-project.org/) about future of your project?
    I knew so little about C/C++ and can yours projcts make future together and witch problems there are.
    But I knew about two linux projects “Compiz” and “Beryl”. Now they develop together :)
    If you enter or build new projact with ALSA. You can bring knowledges how build commercial part and ALSA’s developer - free part :)
    I think if you unite in to one project the linux sound subsystem will be more good :)

    You can do money on techical/other support, but I think - the Linux and Unix/POSIX/whatever compatible operating systems need One good project :)

  11. DOKA Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 7:56 am

    GPL will not help you to get a money, GPL is donation to people.
    Free software is called “free” because it really free :) Free == no money.
    In the future think before to do something ;)

  12. Shawn Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 9:00 am

    This is sad news indeed. I personally did buy a license after you folks opened the source code. I believe in what you’re doing.

  13. Aceler Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 4:39 pm

    I was wrong about Red Hat. I think, today Sun Microsystems is more interesting, because Linux can operate without OSS, Solaris is not. If you stop your development, Solaris can lack of the sound system.

    So, have a talk with Sun, they always need a good progremmers for they products.

  14. siegerstein Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

    OSS better then ALSA be playing sound, I test it more times in different soundcards, it first.
    Second, ALSA - suck. ALSA only for GNU/Linux, OSS - for UNIX (~30 OS).
    OSS API - is more userfull.

    Some way to go best:
    1. Improve that OSS best ALSA, and ypu will be default sound system in GNU/Linux, provide new OSS in Linux kernel.
    2. find sponsors like Suse, Red Hat, Sun
    3. find the strong sizes in OSS and make best it (DMA, API)
    4. GNU/Linux smartfones with OSS?
    5. Write drivers for third party hardware by money, if they can’t (like `some` Linux developers)
    6. porting OSS in more UNIX OS

    and good luck :)

  15. cesium Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 5:53 pm

    “I tried to add some Google ads to our open source WEB pages and to the OSS Programmer’s Guide (which have about 2000 hits/day). In two weeks I have got exactly $00.00 in that way.”

    ?? I never saw any Google ads. Are you sure these ads were added?

  16. siegerstein Says:
    November 9th, 2007 at 1:39 am

    http://linuxdriverproject.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DriversNeeded#Sound

  17. Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves Says:
    November 18th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    It’s actually sad that many of the people here did not take your concerns seriously.

    Do not regret releasing the source code for OSS. In the long run it will prove mightly benefical to a thousand UNIX-like platforms, including Linux. And they will thank you for that.

    Of course that won’t pay your bills, so what I suggest is that you look into the companies that make money out of free software. They usually either sell bundles of hardware+software, or offer complete support solutions for enterprise clients. Sell support licenses, instead of licenses for the software itself. Rethink the business model of 4front, study the competition, and you’ll be fine.

  18. admin0 Says:
    November 18th, 2007 at 4:43 pm

    This is the open source dilemma. You cannot make you living by selling your own software. However you can take loads of software written by others, compile them together with some work of your own (maybe hardware) and sell it as your product.

  19. Matthew Says:
    November 20th, 2007 at 8:36 am

    Having just recently “re-discovered” OSS at the time of open sourcing, I am disappointed to hear that it has caused the company severe financial problems. I admit to feeling somewhat ashamed that I did not support the project more actively than just by using the software (which is very good by the way!) and would be more than happy to buy a license although this is probably now “too little, too late”.

    With regards to generating income, T-shirts and suchlike would probably not be the answer. You could ask for donations, but this would probably not be effective. A company cannot survive on voluntary donations. I think the google-ads is a good idea, but I (like others) have seen no ads on any of your pages. I would be more than happy to see ads on the site. It’s quite standard these days. Just don’t go over the top. :-)

    I can’t really see how joining with alsa-project would generate any income. Its free. The only way to do it I think would be either to charge for services, (troubleshooting, support, writing of new device drivers) or to find another project/program that does sell its services and is in need of of a high(er) quality audio system. I know that Asterisk appears to be doing quite well giving away its software and charging for support and services. I’m not saying that Asterisk is the one for OSS, but just trying to give an example.

    Something different. Seeing as how OSS is the GrandDaddy of Unix audio, could you not use your not inconsiderable knowledge of Unix, audio and device drivers to start a new project that people would be willing to pay for? Media or music services? Non DRM’d mp3 services or such like. It is quite a deviation from your business now, but it might be an idea. The non DRM’d mp3 industry seems to be slowly taking off.

    And now for something completely different…again using your vast knowledge of audio, device drivers and programming skills. Creative Labs have basically shot themselves in the foot with regard to the sound card business. From being the market leader a few years ago with the soundblaster range, they are now relegated to a kind of Apple-chaser with their Zen devices. Their sound cards are not what they were. After having convinced everyone to get Audigy’s of X-Fi’s, they suddenly realised (way too late) that Vista was going to kill a good deal of the functionality of the cards. EAX and all the other (proprietary) bells and whistles went out of the window when Vista came. Perhaps the 64bitness gave them troubles as well, as confirmed by the lack of some functions in their Vista 64bit drivers . It would appear that Creative chose the wrong option and have now lost their number 1 position. So, here’s the idea. Are you sitting down with a whisky in your hand, just in case? ;-) We (Linux/Unix users) need a well designed, featurefull and well supported piece of opensource hardware. Yes, a new sound card. A sound card which you would design (or at least co-ordinate the design of) due to your intimate audio/Unix knowledge. I think that there are probably not many people better placed than you to do this. I know that IBM recently did something similar with one of their CPU designs (forget which, thought PowerPC6) and I believe they did have some success although I didn’t really follow it that closely. OpenSound would then truly be open sound. Asterisk (to use them as an example again!) also makes hardware, for which they charge. The software is free, which stimulates their hardware sales, and if you have a problem you can’t solve then you can hire them to get it all up and running for you. So, if you could design the hardware (perhaps with collaboration from other devs and people “in the know”) and software, then I can see a whole new world opening up for OSS. Hardware and software designed by opensource experts would put you back on top, where you deserve to be. I realise that this is quite a task, but there are also other examples of people doing this with Linux/Unix. The Openmoto or Openmoko phone is an example of an opensource hardware and software device. It is only for devs and extremely interested parties at the moment, but it certainly looks promising.

    Hannu, I would just like to take this opportunity to wish you and the company all the success in the world and I look forward to buying my first OpenSound sound card in the not too distant future. :-)

    As an aside, it appears that not very many people are aware that you opensourced OSS or that interested either. A campaign similar to the SpreadFirefox one might change this. Get the word out what you have, what it does, what it does better than others and what it does that others don’t do. This way you could present it in a more positive light than just as a competitor to alsa. Also, the need for flashplayer which support OSS natively would need to be worked on. Flashplayer 7 for linux used (apparently) OSS as standard. Flashplayer 9 only supports alsa. The revolutionlinux solution regarding flashsupport does not work, at least not for me. The pulseaudio version of flashsupport (or is flashplayer.so?) doesn’t work either here on my amd64 box. This is the only thing I (and others) haven’t manged to get working with OSS.

    Well, its been a bit of a ramble, but I hope I may have given food for thought, at least. I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed for you, because I want to keep using OSS. I hope others feel the same.

    All the best!

    Matthew

  20. Lavendem Says:
    November 21st, 2007 at 5:12 pm

    I was expecting something unfortunate like this would happen.. However Hannu, and Dev, both of you are really great in DSP/FFT and audio programming in general; USE that knowledge to create a new product that will make ALSA seem like a small puppy. CREATE your own ideals and visuals of a new product that once will be an industry standard. SELL that product to earn money and feed your family.

    Here are some ideas that you might find interesting. I know you can create something like this, Hannu:
    1. YOUR VERY OWN MUSIC STUDIO APPLICATION.
    2. YOUR VERY OWN PLUG-IN STANDARD LIKE VST.
    3. YOUR VERY OWN AUDIO ROUTING STANDARD.
    4. COMBINE ALL ABOVE TO YOUR VERY OWN PRODUCT.

    Think about it, your own music studio application with your own synthesizer/sampler plug-in format and a way to route the audio to another application. It is a lot of work, but if you have the time and the knowledge to do it, then you have a chance to succeed.

    Hannu if you don’t create something new, you won’t earn money. I give this hint from friend to friend, Hannu. Everything good in life started from new ideas. New ideas come from wise people. You belong to these wise people, don’t waste your knowledge, Hannu.

    Cheers,
    Lavendem

  21. Daniel Says:
    November 26th, 2007 at 9:43 am

    I couldn’t understand some parts of this article There is something wrong in the state of Open Source, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

  22. mutant Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 9:26 am

    so, you basically drop your product, without preparing any kind of new bussiness model and when the monies don’t magically appear out of nowhere you blame open source for your faults

    nice

  23. Azrael Nightwalker Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 9:47 am

    I think that the problem with OSS is marketing.
    Who cares if you made a better product if noone knows about it?
    You need to advertise your product more.
    Send messages to Linux/FLOSS/software web sites. Go to developers’ summits. Talk to linux distributions’ developers. Encourage them to use OSS.
    Dropping a program to the pit of internet is not enough.

  24. aegis maelstrom Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 3:55 pm

    Dear Mr. Savolainen,

    in the beginning I would like to thank you for all our efforts.
    However, honestly speaking, you have amazed me with your frank declaration of lack of strategy and planning how to live after opensourcing the code. One may say these are the things to be done before opensourcing, not three months after the fact.

    I truly hope this is not too late and you will find a way to coin something strongly positive from all your OSS story. I hope as well that this project will bring further advances for the FOSS world.

    What is more, maybe some changes in your strategical surrounding (like progress of PulseAudio, strategic choices of some GNULinux/*BSD distros) can give you some opportunities waiting to use.

    Regarding the businessplan - I think you should listen carefully what Mathiew wrote above. What is more, there are many best (or not-that-best) practises or studies how the open source business may look like - starting from The Magic Cauldron by E. Raymond (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/) to close to the hardware projects like the one of Hans Reiser. Maybe a company is not the best solution? I know that living from open source is very difficult, especially if you don’t have promotional/advertising potential that i.e. Mozilla Corp. (Google’s partner) has - but drivers support, tech design, joint-projects or consulting are some ways worth a consideration.

    I wish you and the OSS the best future.

    a.m.

  25. suffering user Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 4:10 pm

    ALSA is indeed defective, but I’m not about to use something unless it
    is in the official kernel tree and not deprecated.

    Thus I have no audio right now. :-(

    The numerous incompatible sound mixer daemons do not help
    the situation. The number of them is fast approching infinity.
    They all eat RAM, distort the audio, don’t supply /dev/* files
    for my code, prevent each other from working, etc.

    I wish 4front had never been started. I think it led to ALSA.
    If there had never been a proprietary OSS, then there would
    not have been such desire to rewrite. The OSS in the kernel
    would have been better maintained by more people.

    Now EVERYBODY is screwed. :-(

  26. Zbigniew Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 7:20 pm

    ALSA is since years sponsored by SuSE. Perhaps could be possible for you to talk about sponsorship to IBM/Sun/Dell/NVidia/ATI etc., or to prospering Linux-related software houses like RedHat/Mandriva/Ubuntu etc.?

    Why not? For example particuralry IBM seems to be strongly interested in supporting Linux and related software.

  27. gotar Says:
    December 2nd, 2007 at 6:23 am

    First of all you need to wait until ALSA becomes obsolete (it WILL happen I hope). OSS is considered to be dead, because it’s marked as obsoleted in Linux kernel sources and current mainstream follows ALSA. As soon as major distros switch to OSS 4.0 ordinary people and programmers will notice OSS again. IMHO it was a mistake to close OSS for such long time. Look what happened to XFree86 - there were commercial video cards drivers available and now it’s all about nVidia, AMD/ATI and Intel (binary or not).

  28. meeero Says:
    December 3rd, 2007 at 6:42 am

    ALSA is sponsored by SuSE..? didn’t know that…

  29. Stefan Waidele Says:
    December 3rd, 2007 at 1:46 pm

    There is absolutely nothing wrong with “the state of open source”, and this blogpost is proof of that.

    You throw your problem (here: trouble with conversion from one business model to another) towards the community and get tons of good advice - for free.

    I just hope some of that is actually helping you to “pay the bills & feed the family”. But let’s be honest: Did opening the sources kill OSS on Linux, or did the proprietary license do that?

    (As you said: “Device drivers should be free” but I need to add: “for the customer”. IMO, the hardware manufactorers should be the one funding the developement of drivers for their boards.)

  30. laquoia Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 4:41 am

    OSS was opensourced much too late.
    Minimum 5 years late. Stop crying. It’s your own fault.
    Alsa made OSS obsolete. PULSEAUDIO is the future.

    Your future could be to contribute to PULSEAUDIO and then sell your know-how and support. For example for ThinClient-Soundsystems. Network transparent sound, multiple OSes, superior timing capabilities - something that OSS wasn’t able to do.

    http://www.pulseaudio.org/

  31. OSNote » Open Sound System: Umsatzrückgang durch Open Source Says:
    December 5th, 2007 at 11:50 am

    […] Seitdem die Firma 4Front Technologies, ihren Quellcode für die Unix-Audio-Architektur Open Sound System (OSS) als Open Source veröffentlicht hat, verzeichnet sie einen Rückgang der Einnahmen. In seinem Blog beklagt sich Hannu Savolainen von 4Front, dass Open-Source-Entwicklung nicht mehr profitabel sei. OSS wurde im Linux-Kernel bereits vor einiger Zeit durch das Soundsystem ALSA verdrängt (via golem.de). […]

  32. admin0 Says:
    December 9th, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    Hi folks and many thanks for the comments to this thread.

    The following has been suggested:

    - We should join ALSA. This is unfortunately not possible because the design goals of ALSA and OSS are so different (almost opposite).

    - We should have open sourced OSS at least 5 years ago. In that way we would have in the current situation 5 years earlier. For your record OSS was originally an open source product for 5 years (10-15 years ago). During that time I developed it in my spare time. However even then I didn’t manage to get any donations (other than few free sound cards from couple of companies). OTOH I dared not to ask.

    - We should do more marketing which means we should hire some marketing staff and pay for them. We have decided to minimize our costs so that users of OSS don’t need to pay for company functions they don’t need.

    - We should not have done a port of OSS for SCO which is the public enemy number one of the Linux community. The reason was that SCO paid the work. We have not been paid by any companies in the Linux business and the chances for that are minimal (or nonexistent).

    - We should start doing something else (services, hardware, Win/Mac software) and fund the development of OSS in this way. Yes, this is something we can do. The point is that in this way developing OSS becomes just a hobby. Is there any reason to spend our free time in developing OSS instead of spending it for some other hobbies?

  33. fw_crocodile Says:
    December 10th, 2007 at 1:43 pm

    I’m just a user so my point could be clueless.

    My impression is that in the open source world there are really few case of successfull business that only sell software directly to the user base.
    Generally the revenue came from all the activities that the software generate and not by the software itself.

    An audio driver is not really interesting for the majority of the peoples as they simply use the one they found on the distro or in the kernel tree, like me, and if they don’t have problems they don’t look around to found something that could give better results. So probably selling licenses could be very difficult.
    And if I would probably pay some money to get a better sound I’ll not pay 50$. But at the same time I don’t think lowering the price could be a solution to your problem.

    Another thing I could say, is that it seems to me that your return on the open source world has been very quiet, and only few people have noticed it. A big part of the new linux user base don’t know it’s existence as OSS is pratically out of kernel from a long time now or at least see it as deprecated in the kernel tree, the few that look in.

    I don’t know how many people you are or you need to continue your work on OSS and that could have a big relevance on the choice you have to make. Personally, I think that the better option is to hire your knowledge to some hardware producer interested on having good sound driver on POSIX system and to continue pushing OSS as if it’s really better than ALSA and company it have to take it’s place.

    But i don’t see how you can make a revenue just by selling audio driver.
    Even if i really would like to have a good mixer and sound processing configurator on my linux machine i don’t think i would pay to have it and any way if there is the choice i’ll probably use the free one. Audio is a so basic function of my machine I don’t really like to have to pay for it, and know, if you are in trouble, why should I pay for a service you cannot garantee or at least has an uncertain future?

    Making an open sound card is not really an option in the OSS perspective i think, i would certainly buy it as i think it’s a beautifull idea and i’m starting to be tired by all this ******* DRM, high definition proprietary codec, ecc.. but if you sell it all your work will be around the card and it’s driver and not around OSS. And anyway I don’t know if there is really a market for such a card on the today multimedia entertainment market.

    The open source world is a very selective place if you want to make money
    selling software and is not only a question of code quality, probably sometimes keeping a closed source model could be a more easy way to get some money but i don’t think it’s the right choice for better innovation and knowledge progress. But if the problem is how to eat and pay the bill I understand (thing’s that some people above don’t seem to caught) that these sort of principles have to be taken apart.

    Good Luck

  34. Tom Servo Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 3:03 pm

    Aren’t you getting anything out of the Sun deal? I’m talking about the integration into Solaris Nevada. I’d figure there’s money for licensing involved.

  35. admin0 Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

    There are many kinds of software developers. So called “1st level” developers (like we) just produce some software on their own. There is not much software from the others we could use (unless some volunteer OSS developers decide to donate their code to us). We use some open source tools such as gcc, binutils, vim, make and few others in our work but there is nothing we could include in the OSS package.

    2nd level developers take products of other open source developers and combine it with their own work. Then they can sell their “integration” and “consulting” work to one or more customers for profit. However there is no requirement that these developers pay anything to the 1st level because the 1st level product is supposed to be free.

    3rd level developers use products of the 1st and 2nd level developers in their in-house systems. Their salary is paid by the companies they are working for. However there is no requirement that they (or their employers) pay anything to the lover level developers. They may use some commercial Linux distributions and pay for the support.

    As a 1st level developer our only choices seem to fund the development of OSS by doing something else for profit. We can also do contract development such as developing custom versions of OSS for some customers. However all this work requires time which is will be out of the development of the open source version. The only alternative that doesn’t require additional work is selling OSS licenses. Unfortunately paying for software seems to be against the ethics of open source users.

    It’s true that we have not managed to keep enough noise about open sourcing OSS. However this seems to be beyond our control. All the press releases and other material we have sent the public have been silently ignored. We don’t have resources to pay for marketing so I don’t know what to do.

  36. admin0 Says:
    December 16th, 2007 at 4:27 pm

    It is true that we are getting paid by Sun for integrating OSS with Nevada. It gives us almost the income we expect (for next 3-4 years). OTOH getting all the required changes done will require our 100% attention during next year. In addition there is strong pressure for moving development of OSS to the ON workspace which would make continuing development of the other OS ports rather difficult.

    Another (moral) problem is that is it fair to have Sun and their customers to pay all the development we do for Linux and the other operating systems. Also how do we fund development of OSS after the contract with Sun is finished.

  37. tradenet Says:
    December 25th, 2007 at 10:55 am

    Frankly, I’d try Mark Shuttlesworth. My 2 cents.

  38. majeru Says:
    December 27th, 2007 at 5:13 pm

    I think that you could get Sun’s money and develop OSS for Solaris, concentrate your attention on that, but in the same time find some big Linux-loving company (Novell, RedHat, Google, IBM or Canonical come in my mind) that could give some money to indirectly hire a few programmers that would maintain the Linux sources in sync, even if only for marketing purposes.

  39. eZombie Says:
    December 31st, 2007 at 4:00 pm

    to laquoia:

    PulseAudio is great, but it’s just a sound server. It *uses* OSS on my workstations to get the data to the soundcard.

    ALSA is basically turning Linux into a Windows Wannabe. We shall have to start calling the duo L$ and M$. I want to run a unixy OS, but don’t want to run Linux? Then too bad for me, I must be punished for my choice (according to ALSA) and suffer with no sound.

    Nice.

    The ‘free’ in FSF should equal freedom, not socialism. Having a no cost choice means nothing when there really is no choice at all.

  40. Iz Opera Perm Says:
    January 5th, 2008 at 6:53 pm

    I’m watching these comments totally bemused.
    It seems to be populated mostly by a load of clueless amateurs who know zilch about professional audio!

    There is an object lesson to be taken to heart.
    The reason why macOSX is used in nearly all recording studios all over the world is because of commercial software, and expensive systems where we can’t afford to waste time (even years) talking about rubbish, and then trying to imitate serious boys like AVID, Pro tools, Wavelab, et al with mickey mouse tools that simply don’t work.
    I hate MacOS, and I won’t be seen dead using Avid or OSX, but that’s personal.

    Personally I would love to use Linux in a professional capacity, but it’s just not going to happen with the open source community because they don’t understand the demands of commercial audio-visual production, and frankly you get nothing for nothing. Simple as that!

    My experiences of Alsa have been just that, over the years! We thought win32 was bad….well come and try Alsa!!! it REALLY sux!
    A pity, because firewire and DV works great on Linux, gltich free.

    It strikes me, there’s a huge irony here. The basic OS especially since Etch is ultra solid, but the rest is all flaky.

    Dependency problems take ages to fix,-
    taking a banal dual head video card- make it work on Linux is a mega chore, involves countless read-me’s, & frankly who these days is interested in writing aliases into some defeective half thought out piece of software interface, when this all vanished as long ago as 10yrs back on any current main stream OS.

    I’m not knocking Linux, but from what I can see OSS has been wrong footed from the start, by being to market too early, then expecting something from the Linux community it will never give;-

    Market demand/revenue comes from professionals.
    Linux Open source clientele don’t understand this.
    They think everything is free. It’s NOT.

    Professionals pay, because they have to make DVDs, recordings, and do DSP/hi def video work.
    At the end of the day, they don’t really care how much it costs, they have to earn their livings with it.
    If it’s more solid, who cares if it doesn’t develop fast enough. Time to market is everything these days.

    Also but;-
    Sorry, but what is a $50 royalty compared to a 10Tb disk Raid array or SAN needing to be available 24/7/365.

    If some day (soon I hope) someone starts understanding properly we are not interested in 25 different styles of crap volume controls, and 99 different compressed audio players, then there is hope in there.

    For the time being there’s a fat lot of use in editing/DSP recording software for Linux, and that is where the crunch comes.

    Go try pro-tools, take a few lessons, come and do some multi channel live recordings daily also, then come back many of the “smarmy git” commentators above and tell us what we should be doing to “open source” Avid software.

    I’m sure we will take you very seriously )))))

  41. Toby Smithe Says:
    January 6th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

    You can’t just chuck out a tarball with a nice licence and expect everyone to bow down to you, or even notice you exist. You have to build a community. E-mail distributions’ mailing lists, get blog posts aggregated on their Planets, get more Digg/Slashdot attention, be proactive: strike deals. Furthermore, instead of just releasing tarballs of your ‘testing’ sources once in a while, keep an open version control system, a bzr or git trunk, for example. Only with these things will your community build up, and you see success in an open source world. It seems you’ve become a bit out of touch having spent so long in the proprietary software world; let’s change that for the better!

  42. David Chisnall Says:
    January 9th, 2008 at 9:10 am

    Hi,

    I first came across 4Front many years ago trying to get my sound card to work under Linux. At the time, there were two choices; ALSA which was buggy, under documented, and very hard to configure and OSS from 4Front which cost almost as much as my sound card. What did I do? I gave up on Linux and installed FreeBSD which had working support in the main tree.

    Why didn’t I buy OSS from you? Because it was too expensive. In absolute terms it was quite cheap, but I had already paid for the sound card and paying anything extra to have something I had already paid for actually work seemed like a rip off.

    This comes back to a fundamental issue for open source business models. You can’t sell off-the-shelf open source software because the two business models are fundamentally incompatible. No one gets paid for open source software, they get paid for WRITING open source software.

    So, returning to your specific issue, who benefits from your work? Three groups of people:

    - End users.
    - Distributions.
    - Hardware manufacturers.

    The first group are unlikely to be willing to pay. OS X and Windows don’t charge for drivers and this is where most end users are coming from. Expecting them to pay for something that looks like core OS functionality after they already have downloaded or bought the OS won’t work except in a few cases.

    Distributions are a possibility. This is, I believe, effectively your current revenue stream. Sun is paying you because they want good sound support in Solaris. You might be able to get the same kind of support from Canonical, Red Hat, the Free and OpenBSD foundations and so on.

    Finally, hardware manufacturers. Very few sound card makers have good in-house driver developers and even fewer have good developers with *NIX experience. Approach the ones that are currently the worst supported. Get them to pay you to support their products.

    You might want to take a look at Precision Insight, Inc’s business model here for some inspiration. They made money writing drivers for XFree86. Companies like Matrox contracted out *NIX driver development to them. Companies like Red Hat paid them to release open drivers for Linux.

    I hope this helps. I’m really glad to see OSS 4.0 released under a BSD license for FreeBSD. It will be nice to see the same sound interfaces on all *NIX flavours.

    David

    P.S. I came across this in your documentation ‘OSS 4.0 supports virtual mixing (under most operating systems other than FreeBSD).’ FreeBSD has supported virtual channels in their own sound code since 4.x and with 5.x and onwards the vchans are automatically allocated whenever someone opens a new /dev/dsp (and in 7.x it supports per-vchan volume controls). Your code seems a step backwards from this.

  43. Flatland_Spider Says:
    January 9th, 2008 at 11:31 am

    I think Iz Opera Perm hit the nail on the head.

    Developing a professional grade audio ecosystem with OSS as the crown jewel could be a good idea. Even if you do nothing else then roll together bunch of current open source programs then do consulting on getting them to work. The FOSS community could use an audio Guru.

    The PC-BSD camp, or maybe the FreeBSD camp for that matter, might be approachable about lending some support to OSS. If nothing else someone else might be willing to keep up the port of OSS while you concentrate on Solaris.

  44. Paul Dufresne Says:
    January 9th, 2008 at 11:09 pm

    This comment about 3thd level not paying the 2nd one not paying the 1st one.
    This looks as the problem but maybe this is the solution.
    2nd level developers are the one who are likely to pay you early, but you say they will pay you only if you force them to do. Then force them. Make improvements in close source to your software a while then sell them under GPL on an online auction web site. You can even begin resell it just after having sold it, and that honestly, by mentioning how much it was sold before to whom.

  45. Diego Says:
    January 15th, 2008 at 7:51 am

    Oh well, there is “something wrong”.

    Surprisingly, Sun or Red Hat don’t seen to be stopping making money. I think the problem is at your end.

  46. Aki Says:
    January 22nd, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    First I hope that you do not stress too mush with my & other amateurs comments.

    From the end user perspective I feel that sound card business for regular users is dead as is driver business to 1$ chips (even those are sold in large quantity). I think it is already time to accept that professional sound driver development for Linux is not easy or even possible (PRO does it for money amateur because love) . Trust your self. If you do not find reason why to develop Linux etc. driver then do not do it.

    I hope you can gain again some fame in Linux (Ubuntu) ecosystem with open-closed-reopen-source and open some new studio / manufactures doors for your professional sound development needs.

    At the end next to all work in Finland is amateur based as we are paid & taxed so that money is not the motive. But at least Finnish have have some oss success :)

    It does not help you professionally, but you where my idol 10+ years ago.

  47. Alejandro Nova Says:
    February 7th, 2008 at 11:40 am

    I’ll make you an stupid question.

    In http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=5 you told us that the reasons why OSS wasn’t in the Linux mainline kernel were the following:

    * It’s not GPLed (yet). Instead it’s a commercial product by some evil capitalist pigs.
    * It’s not in the Linux kernel source tree so it doesn’t exist.
    * It’s being used also by the public enemies of Linux.
    * It’s “binary only”.

    So, if reason number one (IMHO the only one that matters) has disappeared, why are reasons 2 and 4 holding their feet? And why the hell OSS isn’t in Linux mainline kernel? Only reason 3, “OSS is being used also by the public enemies of Linux”, is holding on its ground now. I would add a reason 5, “The ego of ALSA developers is too big” and a 6th reason, inertia. I saw a similar problem with CDRecord, now released under CDDL, replaced by an inferior choice (a half assed copy called wodim, included in every distro, and orphaned in May 2007). It was a shame that, while CDRecord supported BluRay burning, wodim had serious bugs burning DVDs, that were never fixed.

    Have luck understanding some people’s notion of “freedom”. And have luck with OSS. It’s great. Really.

  48. Random Guy Says:
    February 8th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    AFAIK the ALSA lead developer, Jaroslav Kysela, already works for Red Hat. So it’s unlikely that Red Hat would be interested in buying 4Front now.

    Unless… if you manage to unseat ALSA as the number one Linux sound system. Unfortunately, 4Front isn’t going to be trusted easily. You made OSS proprietary once; you could do it again. Linus isn’t likely going to accept OSS back into kernel unless you can convince him that:

    a) it’s technically superior to ALSA (can’t comment on that myself)
    b) you’re not going to pull the rug from under it again (maybe you aren’t, but are Linus & co. going to believe you?)

    It’s a tough situation. You’d at least have to build an open source business model, so that everybody sees you’re making money with open source and you don’t need to close the source for financial reasons any more.

    If I were you, I think I’d try to get acquired by Sun. They might be interested in securing their only sound system for Solaris by buing 4Front. Of course, the BSD guys might not like it. But do they have the money to support 4Front?

  49. Daniel Says:
    February 12th, 2008 at 5:19 am

    It’s a shame to hear, really.

    However, it’s quite clear where you went totally off-track.

    “We wanted to continue to sell OSS as a commercial product to the customers who want to use OSS from their proprietary/inhouse software.”

    I’ve commented on this before, and I still think it’s a load of bull. Open source doesn’t work this way. If you release something under GPL, you can’t expect people to buy it just because they use proprietary software. Legally they don’t have to, and rationally they have no reason to.

    However, going all the way to GPL isn’t the only way of doing things. For the next version you can retreat to a more restrictive licence that still enables community work. For example you may require licences to be bought for professional work. Note it’s not about proprietary software, that’s stupid. It’s about making CD’s and DVD’s for sale or not.

    Or, you could work out relations with major Linux distributions. They have plenty of revenue, and maybe you could get on that bandwagon. None of them have OSS in their package repository right now.

    If you decide, and I beleive this would suit you the most, you can move to an open source non-free licence. For example Motif worked that way a long time ago, you paid for it and then got the sources. If it’s affordable, and carries improvements worth the upgrade, I’d most certainly buy the next major OSS version. Given that I get the sources, not just the binary.

    In this way you could even work out cooperation with third-party developers. You could use a subscription-based model like CeDeGa. There are plenty of choices.

    —

    Iz Opera Perm: You are mostly right. Linux is a flavor of Unix, and Unix is all about the requirements of another kind of professional: the IT professional.
    Getting dual-head video working is not for musicians or sound professionals to do - it’s the job of the IT pro. And a production environment should either afford one, or buy ready-made products like MacOS.
    As for the shortcomings of open source sound software itself, you are most certainly right. 90% of the software in the open source domain is pure shite. However, there IS a usable 10%, and most of the production-level proprietary suites do have a Linux version, and there is really nothing wrong with the system except needing an IT pro to take care of it in exchange for the versatility.

  50. Daniel Says:
    February 12th, 2008 at 5:39 am

    “The customers who previously bought OSS licenses don’t do it any more. They think that having the source code means that they have at least equal rights than we had.”

    That’s because they do. Well not exactly equal, as you as copyright holders may re-licence the product under other licences, but yes, they can use it in any way they please, the can redistribute it and they can make changes to it and create derivative works (forks) from it under the GPL.
    Have you read the GPL? Have a lawyer read it? Have you read some comments from FSF? I doubt it seriously.

    Have you looked up the difference between “open source” and “free software”? They’re not the same. They’re lightyears apart, and I’m afraid you went “free software” where you only wanted “open source”. A sad blunder really. Not incorrigible if you can financially hold out until the next major release.

    I’m a very satisfied user of OSS, and would be grossly disappointed if such silliness would lead to it being discontinued. Please do go on, and find a licence that enables user access to sources, but ensures your income too. I really recommend CeDeGa and CrossOver Office as research candidates.

  51. Thomas Says:
    February 17th, 2008 at 4:23 pm

    AFAIR, Hannu didn’t back up closing the OSS sources. However, I remember these have been closed since he was no longer the managing director so lost his influence.

    With respect to Daniel’s comment, I noticed that there were still two versions of OSS: Open Source and certain closed source. That latter driver had to be released this way due to NDA. But at the same point, the NDA can raise a suspect of swindling so only open hardware with open source drivers can actually guarantee a success. Designing a versatile and open-architecture sound card with open source drivers, the company would reconquer the Un*x world of sound drivers and applications and you might count on community help as well.

    And yes, the driver provider would indeed gain profits from technical support, training, and furthermore hardware. An example is Asterisk.

    Good luck!

    PS: I don’t know how Linuxant is going, but certainly I’ve done a calculation that actually buying another modem which worked under Linux would be cheaper than Conexant-based modem + driver.

  52. Random Guy Says:
    February 21st, 2008 at 6:11 am

    Quoting Daniel:
    “For the next version you can retreat to a more restrictive licence that still enables community work.”

    … only to find that the community does not want to work with such a restrictive license.

    Usually when someone tries to pull a stunt like this, the community forks the code. Case in point: XFree86 -> X.org. Or even the original OSS/ALSA split. Licensing does matter.

    “For example you may require licences to be bought for professional work.”

    That would not be open source. Open source licenses (as defined by OSI, http://www.opensource.org) allow use of the software for any purpose, commercial or otherwise.

    “Note it’s not about proprietary software, that’s stupid. It’s about making CD’s and DVD’s for sale or not.”

    ??? It would be very much about proprietary software. I’m not sure how this relates to CD/DVD sales though…

    Dual-licensing (think Trolltech, MySQL) could have been an option, though. Get the GPL code free, pay $$$ for proprietary license if you want to use the code in your propietary application. But as 4Front released OSS under BSD license, too, that’s not an option anymore.

    “Or, you could work out relations with major Linux distributions. They have plenty of revenue, and maybe you could get on that bandwagon. None of them have OSS in their package repository right now.”

    I’ve heard there’s some activity in Ubuntu wrt OSS. It’s extremely unlikely that Canonical Ltd. would currently want to finance OSS development, though. SUSE? Don’t know really.

    “Have you looked up the difference between “open source” and “free software”? They’re not the same.”

    For practical purposes, they’re almost the same. For example: GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, MPL, CDDL licenses are both Free Software and Open Source.

  53. Random Guy Says:
    February 21st, 2008 at 6:51 am

    Just a thought. If OSS indeed is superior to ALSA, maybe Suse could use it as a differentiator against Red Hat (who seem to be committed to ALSA)?

  54. anonymous Says:
    February 28th, 2008 at 3:51 pm

    There is no problem with open source, but it’s tricky business.

    If you base your business on closed source, then do not open it. Or open it only under a _copyleft_ licence such as GPL, and sell proprietary licences separately for proprietary software businesses. But as folks have already said, since you licenced OSS with BSD licence, this is practically not an option anymore.

    As Bruce Perens puts it, it seems that you opened your business-differentiating technology:

    http://www.perens.com/works/articles/Economic.html

  55. Roeland Says:
    March 5th, 2008 at 4:15 pm

    at the dutch linux user group list I always adversitsed that OSS was not good, Alsa was a bit better but opensound rocks.

    Clearly Opensound’s stuff has been much much better, more flexible et al. I spent several licenses on it.

    Alsa should be taken out of the mainstream stuff immediately and Opensound placed back.

    Novell, are you listening?

  56. Daniel Says:
    March 11th, 2008 at 7:53 am

    Random Guy:

    “… only to find that the community does not want to work with such a restrictive license.”

    Which community? I beleive you mean the GPL / Linux community here, which no doubt would pull its hands from the project, or fork it. (The question is, what quality will that fork be… ALSA was also a fork of OSS, and it’s a sorry piece of software I’d rather forget.)

    However, a small, specialized community CAN coexist with less-than-free licences, especially in the case of specialized software with emphasis on professional work.
    (Just have a look at the Microsoft’s .NET community. It’s HUGE, helpful and bustling with activity! And .NET is not free software.)

    “??? It would be very much about proprietary software. I’m not sure how this relates to CD/DVD sales though…”

    You see, Hannu here and his team had this silly misconception.
    They beleived that if you install OSS, and then run, say, Maya professional or VMWare workstation on your computer, that’s a GPL violation, and so you should buy the for-pay OSS.
    OSS doesn’t link to anything save the Linux kernel. (Thus, providing binaries only CAN raise a GPL violation, but using the free version will never.)

    How CD and DVD sales come into the picture, I recommended that instead of saying “you can’t use the free OSS because you run a commercial video editing application” (which, in turn, it the stupidest misconception I’ve ever heard), they could say “you can’t use the semi-free OSS because you do professional audio work”.

    “Dual-licensing (think Trolltech, MySQL) could have been an option, though. Get the GPL code free, pay $$$ for proprietary license if you want to use the code in your propietary application.”

    Well, it would work if there was anything to include OSS into.
    You see, you have to link to a database engine to develop software. If you’re building an application for sale or distribution - as opposed to putting it on your own server and running your own web application or something similar -, you need to observe the licence of the DBE.
    You don’t link to OSS. There are no OSS libraries, or if there are, they are not mandatory for using OSS. You open a device file and use it in the standard, UNIX way.
    Building applications for OSS will NEVER create any derived works. Therefore, the idea of dual licencing is dead, as it will NEVER be needed.

    “For practical purposes, they’re almost the same. For example: GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, MPL, CDDL licenses are both Free Software and Open Source.”

    For example, CF grammar membership, Common Greatest Divisor and Circuit Value Problem are both P and NP. Does that make P=NP?!

    “Just a thought. If OSS indeed is superior to ALSA, maybe Suse could use it as a differentiator against Red Hat (who seem to be committed to ALSA)?”

    Well, something being superior in objective ways (easier to install, easier to get to work, better sound quality, less processing power used) is quite different from being superior in subjective ways (we’ve been using it since time immemorable, it’s OURS, it has Linux in its name, it has Advanced in its name, it has all these fun switches and controls, it’s been made by hackers like us, etc.)

  57. Mike Says:
    March 12th, 2008 at 7:44 pm

    Have a look at Ardour - they are pulling in enough each month to support at least one developer simply by setting up a subscription system. Subscription to what, you ask? To nothing, really. You pay to have him develop. I, for one, would gladly donate money each month to have you develop MIDI and proper 32-bit sound support for FreeBSD (and the other BSDs), and if you set it up so people could put money towards development of drivers for their specific hardware - like Cedega - you’d have me supporting development of that too. I have a ton of hardware that I’d love to run on FreeBSD - I like the BSD-family licenses ONLY (like TRUE freedom) - including Roland sound modules via usb-midi, some Emagic AMT-8 and Unitor8 interfaces that use proprietary protocol I’d like to have nailed too, and tons of other interesting stuff. It’d make you the Sherlock Holmes of Unix sound ;-)

    Seeing you develop plugins for the proprietary VSTi format makes me wonder if you couldn’t make a format to rival DSSI and LADSPA that ran on FreeBSD too?

    Just dreaming…

    What got me off the commercial offerings and into TRYING to use FOSS for audio production (which I quickly gave up - the applications were a joke until Ardour hit 2.0) was Emagic being bought by Apple, who then basically said “screw you and your initial purchase + 6 upgrades - you can buy yourself a Mac…”, which, of course, I refuse - I hate the mouse and I hate the glossy white designer-pretend-techie junk, and I hate “user-friendly” - who ever asked for something like 7 clicks to change something I can change in 3 seconds in a shell?

    Anybody say “pro”, not “joe-user-wants-me-to-hold-his-hand”?

    So, I’m living in limbo, having to use Linux (yes, I still hate the whinings of the jealous-and-greedy handcuffs of the GPL) to use Ardour (although I read somewhere it’s been ported to FreeBSD, using Jack, of course - another piece of GPL beauty.

    Logic Audio was a beautiful piece of software (I guess it still is), still my preferred music application (the old version for Windows); flexible, dark colours (much like Ardour), and above all fast.

    The comment above on commercial software vs. foss hits the nail on the head: Ardour is being developed quickly and efficiently to the point where it’s useful PRECISELY because someone is paying the developer to do his job. It’s called motivation, and having money to buy your milk, bread and vitamins sure beats being motivated working on something for free while shoving burgers at the local McD.

  58. SpookyET Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 1:01 am

    ALSA IS CRAP.

    I play music in Banshee, Rhythmbox, mpd, etc. and my windows start to freeze from time to time. They are still movable. Sometimes, they all freeze. Other times one freezes while the other does not. Then the other one freezes in a domino effect.

    It does not seem to cause CPU spikes. Though, htop, system monitor, etc. freeze as well. So, I can’t tell.

    I’ve switched to XMMS. Freezes occur when playing with the ALSA driver.

    When I switch XMMS to OSS, freezes do not occur any more.

    It happens when there is screaming in Alternative/Hard rock. I may be experiencing this bug:

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-lib/+bug/190059

    Today, I switched from ALSA to OSS, and it sounds much better. I’m sorry to see that you have financial problems.

    Even though the code has been open sourced, and one does not have to pay for using it, who will gain the knowledge you have? Forking is not that easy. Linux is becoming very important. Take Pixar; they are using linux to render movies.

    There is a commercial market for audio in Linux. People always search for cutting costs. If you could work with Pro Tools or another vendor to port their app to Linux, you could make money.

    There is also sound-related processing done by researchers, SETI, sonar, wale speech, etc. There is a lot of money in research. If they could do their processing on linux as opposed to another *nix to cut costs, they certainly will help with OSS.
    There is more to sound than just piping mp3s into speakers. That is how you differentiate yourself. If you get a story about “University of Foobar Is Using The Not-So-Dead OSS4″ on huge mainframe on a research project on Slashdot, you are set. ALSA will get a kick in the testicles.

  59. SpookyET Says:
    March 13th, 2008 at 7:47 am

    A business cannot survive without marketing. You do not need a marketing post. You can outsource to an advertising agency. You can also search the forums/bugzilla/mailing lists of popular distributions for audio problems and recommend that they try OSS4. If it works where ALSA failed, you’ll get free advertising, as I’m giving you. There is no substitute for mouth to mouth advertising. If people make noise that ALSA is crap and that it does not work for them, you’ll get packages into more distributions. And if distributions pick it up, the kernel will pick it up.

    For both commercial and open source software, selling retail generates little revenues. Do you think Microsoft makes a lot of money from Vista and Office sales at Office Depot? Do you think that people pay $400 for Vista? No, they buy VISTA from the OEM for $100, and the OEM pays $10 to Microsoft. Windows sells for $10.

    Money is with big institutions. That’s applicable to both open and closed source. Why do you think Microsoft created the 6 year contract where you receive updates every 3 years? Yet, it took them 5 years to release Vista. I saw it coming. Just like you did with Sun, you need to get a big contract from a big institution. I would try to focus on professional audio/video companies like Avid more than IBM, Canonical, etc because when you improve something for Avid in OSS, everyone benefits while in the latter, only IBM, Canonical may benefit. If everybody benefits, it will speed up its adoption.

  60. dasickis Says:
    March 18th, 2008 at 4:20 pm

    I think you should focus on getting a very specialized project up and running that deals with your amazing knowledge on sound systems. It no longer matters how well you maintain the code now (not completely true), but the main reason people were bitter that your code was non-GPL was because they were not in control. Now you have put the community back in power, you should go off and do what keeps you alive.

    Making money is much more important for you now then making sure OSS works on a bleeding edge 40 processor 128 bit machine that runs HP-UX. I feel like listening to the previous commenters about creating products for niche markets (e.g. audio pros, SETI, etc) that would be more beneficial for you than making sure OSS still works with the latest build of Ubuntu.

    Now it’s in our hands, we’ll handle the bullshit of course it’ll be harder than you just doing it, but it would be worse if you had to take OSS back into a restrictive license. If you think that’s too much work for the community look at the grave ALSA dug.

  61. Matt Says:
    March 18th, 2008 at 7:20 pm

    The Linux hardware market is an interesting beast. The following statements cover OEMs, ODMs, SIs, Solution Providers, and a number of other classes of commercial [1] organizations

    For Windows (being proprietary), you are forced to partner with companies if you want to build a solution based around Windows. At the very least you have a corporate entity that has developed and supported the stock driver for Windows (either in-the-box, or from the IHV’s website).

    This has a number of profound effects for people building solutions..

    1) They have a corporate IHV contact point for driver enhancement and support. This can easily be the IHV themselves, or a third party.
    2) You don’t start down an solutions process unless you understand the terms of engagement for the parts of the hardware that you rely on.

    Now switch to Linux. For solutions providers (mostly embedded, the desktop market is still way too marginal), Linux offers some clear benefits… Note that I am intentionally ignoring the previous OSS model that provided a proprietary value add that solved some problems that commercial solutions providers would be willing to pay for. The next section assumes that there is *NO* intrinsic value add in the driver with going through OSS for driver support.

    i) Empowerment; That is clear, you have all the source and you can invest internally to push yourself over the hump.
    ii) Independence; The IHV and the driver authors are in very rare circumstances the same people. You can deal with a capable driver author without formal engagements.
    iii) Price; This again is clear. The value proposition against XP Embedded is measurable. There are no thirdparty commercial agreements.
    iv) Prototyping; You have 95% of what you need already in 95% of the distributions out there. You add value by integrating and providing a complete HW/SW package.
    v) Free support; The ‘community’ provides support. It may not be time critical or guaranteed, but there are lots of people on the internet willing to lend a hand.

    So if a solution provider decides that Linux is their platform of choice they typically go through a number of steps.

    A) Decide on Linux through iii and iv (Price and ability to prototype), this makes it easy to ‘kick off the project’.
    B) As problems are found, the engineers surf, contact projects and generally try to workout the problems themselves with minimal additional enginering effort.
    C) When the crap hits the fan and something does work, the organization will try to recover as easily as possible by beefing up internally (either more staff or contractors). The IHV, their driver provider, or a third party drover support organization is rarely contacted since that involves a whole other level (legal, commercial agreements, rights ownership, licenses, etc) of effort that wasn’t originally scoped into the project because the project was kicked off under A)
    D) If they are still between a rock and a hard place, two things begin to happen…
    i) the project is cancelled because they have to do what they didn’t do in C)
    ii) If the project survives, and there are non-commercial avenues for support (ALSA, OSS communities) where you can hire an individual expert for a period.
    iii) If no expert is available. (And lets face it, for most drivers there are maybe only a maximum of six or so freelance people *globaly* that assist. Then urgent requests to the IHV or their commercial driver maintainer are made to help dig them out of a time-critical hole.
    iv) If the IHV doesn’t have a formal channel, *ONLY* then does the third-party, unaffiliated driver maintainer get contacted.

    So under Linux, *any* organization that is trying to provide third party commercial support for fully open source drivers are stuck ultimately at the end of chain where a good portion of the possible business will be lost since it is a ‘Hail Mary’ final hope for a project that is probably already not feasible.

    Linux is a very hard place to make a buck when writing drivers for a particular class of devices.

    The above position is from both an embedded solutions provider and also my view from with an IHV.

    [1] Commercial is used heavily here since it the purpose of the post on the blog is lamenting the lack of commercial basis for driver support under Linux. (Commercial is about companies or individuals who are willing to pay money).

  62. Chris Says:
    April 26th, 2008 at 4:50 am

    I want to respectfully present an open-source type of business model presented by Martin Mickos (former CEO of MySQL) in the article “Closing MySQL: Marten Mickos Responds”.

    Basically, his idea is that the core code base is developed to utilize plug-ins. The base is open-sourced, but profit is made from plug-in development. The open-sourced code may allow for some functionality, but anyone wanting added functionality would pay for plug-ins.

    People will feel better about paying you if they can point to something in your service, even something insignificant, and think, ‘I’ll get this added benefit by paying’.

    Plug-ins authored by the developers of the core code would, by their origins, have an added legitimacy that would make them the first option for those looking to pay money for added functionality.

    I thought it was an interesting approach, but I must add that I have no personal experience with these things.

    Thank You for your hard work and efforts on OSS..

  63. Hannu Savolainen Says:
    May 9th, 2008 at 5:26 pm

    This kind of business modl may work very well for one or few kind of open source software development. However it will not work for everybody.

    The golden idea behind opens source business is that application developers develop solutions to customers based on other open source products. They get paid by their customers. As a byproduct they release their own software under an open source license. If they have made changes and improvemts to the other packages then they contribute the changes back to the original developers. Everybody gets paid and more open source software gets developed as a byproduct.

    However this model works only for 2nd level developers who can write their products on top of work made by the others. However there are also 1st level developers (like us) who (for various reasons) cannot use work made by anybody else. In our case there is nothing we can use. We cannot take sound card drivers developed by anybody else because they will not fit in the multi-platform model of OSS. If we decide to take a driver from (say) ALSA then we will have to spend weeks or months on doing line by line conversions and the result will be full of errors. We can only hope that somebody contributes new OSS drivers to us but that has not happened so far.

    So at this moment we have to make our living on doing custom development that is in some way related with OSS. This means developing customer specific applications or customizing OSS for companies like Sun who will include OSS in their products. The result is that we can spend only about 10% of our time to developing OSS features that are useful for average OSS users. In addition inclusion of OSS to OpenSolaris is causing strong pressure to stop developing the cross-OS source tree of OSS and to move the development to the OpenSolaris workspace.

    There are rare cases where 1st level open source developers can live on their work. This can happen with killer applications like MySQL, Apache, Samba and the Linux kernel itself. This kind of applications are business critical and companies are willing to pay for them to ensure that they will get proper support as long as they will need it.

    However sound device drivers are business critical to for just very few customers. For most users device drivers are supposed to be free (come together with the hardware). In addition all kernel code is supposed to be free too. So we cannot sell the drivers. We even cannot sell support because nobody is willing to pay for that. We can hope to get donations but that has not happened. We cannot fund our living by selling banner adds because the hit count of our web site is far less than marginal. So developing OSS has become our hobby and we will have to make our living by doing something else.

  64. JR Says:
    May 11th, 2008 at 6:30 am

    >> We can only hope that somebody contributes new OSS drivers to us but that has not happened so far.
    Whatwith OSS being proprietary, I’m not surprised if there haven’t been driver contributions. At present you’re at a point where your product is open sourced but lacks global awareness. Hell, I was convinced OSS was dead and deprecated until I chanced upon a thread over on ubuntuforums. Ever ignorant, I figured ALSA was just the next step of evolution from OSS, not a fork.

    This is very much like the KDE vs Gnome clash. Qt being proprietary, FOSS movement rebelling and creating GTK, Qt open sourced but the old grudge lingers. Further, you’ve been marked as *deprecated* and not just off limits. You’ve made changes to your product, both over the years and in licensing, and now you need to change the image of your product in people’s heads.

    Reaching out is key. Get it back into the linux kernel for one, remove the stigma of deprecation and the stigma of having been proprietary, which the cruel eyes of the Community does not look kindly upon. Hit slashdot, digg, mailing lists, random blogs. Promote OSS’s good points and not just ALSA’s bad ones. It’s free as in freedom and it’s already supported by everything that supported ye olde deprecated OSS. Possible to work with pulseaudio and make them compatible? Get the community to work with you.

    Your way of working will unescapably have to alter, this is true. Getting corporate funding for developing OSS would be ideal, of course, but you’ll likely need to actively seek out deals.

  65. Resell Rights Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    Resell Rights…

    Customers are people from whom one earns money. Under their old arrangement (record label, distributor, retailer, etc), yes, you would have paid money for the album, but that in no way makes you Radio Head\’s customer. The money all goes to middle me…

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