No I think you will see a total fade away from GIGA except for the hobbyist programmer who just wants to see how it ticks. And the whole golden age will pass into the ancient yore, like Amiga.

I am not saying that is where it should go, just that it is the reality of the marketplace. Many of the best inventions of the 20th century were flops…. and look at the brilliance of Tesla… a genius we are only now beginning to appreciate.

Whether or not it’ll be better than something else out there already, that’s a different story.

My guess is that Tascam will probably just try and sell the codebase off, though. Or maybe they already tried to do that and failed to find a buyer.

Nice to imagine but unfortunately he’s unlikely to end up silencing himself (permanently) that way.

Peter,

Maybe the question here is which is more valuable to creator in the long run, the GigaStudio software itself or the sample libraries they have invested in. I suspect it might be the sample libraries. If so, it might make more sense to aim for opening up the file format rather than the software. Of course even that may be encumbered with ownership issues, but I have a gut feeling that its a more achievable goal.

Open source code (or free software, if you like),

I think I just heard the sound of Richard Stallman pounding his head against a desk somewhere…

As for simple projects versus big, monolithic ones … yes, you can fork projects, but that’s obviously not always the best approach.

My ultimate point is, it may be unrealistic to expect an open-sourced GigaStudio. That’s it. I think it’s better to recognize that now, because otherwise people could unfairly assume Tascam is holding the code “hostage” (which may or may not be the case), or that, at the opposite extreme, open source is incapable of producing great software (which is simply wrong).

A few things to clear up. I run a couple of open source projects in Fedora space. To open source a product properly, you don’t need an “active community” to start with, by open sourcing things, even ugly things, you have a chance to build a community. Things travel by word of mouth. It is true the best projects are the ones that start as open on day 1, and are constantly in tune with their users to work together to improve them. With an existing app, there is freedom to deconstruct it, so you might be suprised at what sort of community that may grow around it if the upstream knows what it is doing. In any case, it’s about communication and transparency, and accepting all comers — more so than having interested parties on day 1. Open Source “marketing” in that case, is the antithesis of how it is typically done in proprietary space. If your application sucks, people won’t use it — if it doesn’t suck — they will.

You say “Open source code (or free software, if you like), is just one part of what this software industry needs”. I agree — the best way to get there is an open development process and through building more open source applications. It’s hard to NOT do good interchange formats when you realize that the entire Linux/Unix philosophy is about making small tools work together with other tools. Take the simple shell pipe for instance. Simply by having more open applications, there will be a demand to have them interoperate. This is much better than trying to create a proprietary standard, that is likely governed by standards commitees — let things evolve organically.

I’m not sure what your ultimate point of this piece is, but if folks are interested in more open source music applications, joining some of the existing communities would be a great start — or putting together a group to build a new one also flies. The petition of course can’t hurt, and should be encouraged — in fact, owners of the application may actually benefit provided licensing is done in such a way where it does not turn off potential contributers.

You say with blender you would like something simpler and more managable — thankfully you have the ideas from that project to use as a starting point, should anyone want to choose to create one. You are not wired to contributing just to blender. Freedom to fork is one of the virtues of Free Software.

Ultimately the greatest benefit from any application being open source is the highly unpredictable network effect of what people may do with it — often things you would never expect. This network effect builds exponentially the more tools are in the ecosystem.

Tascam has the opportunity here to show extreme leadership and to help create some very exciting technology, provided they take advantage of available resources and expertise in how other applications build successful communities of contributers.

I could see some high quality LGPL’d library companies being hugely beneficial.

So, let’s see more people take the leap, and while they may not get “free developers overnight” (which is almost never the case) what they may see could be equally amazing. In the worst case, it’s a lot of excellent free documentation (in this case code), for others to help generate some exciting new apps and ideas.

Anyway, the OSS world already has some terrific, heavyweight fruits, especially on the server side (MySQL, PHP, Linux, OpenSolaris, Apache, etc., etc., all of which are allowing you to read this comment.) And in music, we’re lucky enough to have Ardour, Pd, Csound, JACK, and many others. So I think it’s reasonable to say, at this point, if you want more, you have to build more. :) And maybe it doesn’t *have* to be — shouldn’t be — a giant, monolithic app. OSS has an opportunity to do something much more lightweight. (Csound, in many ways, has endured because it’s very elegant and doesn’t do everything.)