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I like this. I run the boutique audio plugin company Airwindows http://www.airwindows.com and last year I ran into a little problem: my payment processor, Kagi, went out of business owing me hundreds of dollars. Your reasons for the No Exit strategy resonate with my thinking when I flipped Airwindows over to a Patreon strategy, decimating my income (I'd grossed close to a quarter million dollars by this point) just so I could release all future plugins as free AU, Mac and PC VSTs. At that point, the tactics became flooding the market with VST versions of software that had been AU-only up to that point, and coming up with promises (such as an open-sourcing program under the MIT license, and I've also debated using the GPL) to motivate people to join the Patreon. If you starve and die, you can't do any work. If you're incredibly poor, you can only work on that which you can afford. (no modeling of Neve consoles here, not properly!) If you have incredible access to capital, sky's the limit, but it seems compulsory to screw over your users because capital demands to be returned tenfold, and this puts HUGE pressure on any dev or creator to turn full-on evil. I don't know the answer and I'm not doing that awesomely, but that's not so different from how things were going before: that market is shriveling, in part because people simply can't pay money for things any more. There are major players which are, I think, staving off total collapse by setting up the most heinous DRM treadmills imaginable and trying to latch on to all the credit cards they can, all while trying to race to the bottom and starve everybody else. I can't target capital as a goal anymore. I'll beg if I have to, I'll accept ugly and scary poverty, but I can't be part of the system geared to leave all the users with nothing. It's open source and tool-distribution for me. The whole concept of being rewarded with wealth for valuable work has become a charade when it gets crowded out by 'rewarded with lots more wealth by helping Microsoft screw everyone over'. The link's broken. And this is a rather big deal in a world where that link's axiomatic. |