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first of all I disagree with your view on proprietary products. besides my view that proprietary software is unethical and you shouldn't use it (including your OS and firmware) because it subjugates you (see the video on our website if you don't see how https://www.zrythm.org/videos/TEDxGE2014_Stallman05_LQ.webm), it makes no difference on product quality whether the product is proprietary or libre. look at linux as an example. what makes a difference is the manpower behind the software, which is either bought with money (see linux, blender, etc.) or comes about from many people donating their work together for a common cause like GNU

your points are valid on the customer support side with logic, but logic has a multi billion company behind it and many years of experience and development - not to mention separate marketing and customer support teams. zrythm is not even in beta yet and I'm pretty much the only developer/maintainer/customer support/UI/UX designer of this with help from volunteer testers and other people in the free software community, so unless someone drops a blank check in my mail or something it will take some time before we can offer customer support and reliability comparable to logic - especially on Windows and Mac because things are extremely hard to build and debug there and no one in the free software community has motivation to learn how they work and I don't really understand those systems either. I rely on third party libs as much as possible there. I don't really understand how GNU/linux system stuff works either, but at least for GNU/Linux-related issues I get a lot of free help available online and from other developers because we are all working for a common cause - I'll gladly give free help to anyone as well because I want free software to succeed. you don't have that with proprietary OSes so you need even more manpower and time there, which money helps with a lot

as things stand, the fact of the matter is that the more we get from zrythm sales and other types of donations, the more time I can spend on development (or even pay people for tutorials/development/design like I have already done) and less time doing other unrelated work. if there wasn't even a price tag for the binaries (which take considerable effort to produce, especially for mac and windows which randomly break and have complex packaging requirements and are a pain/impossible to debug properly) I would spend even less time on this out of necessity. donations aren't consistent. we were lucky enough to receive a relatively large donation from the FundOSS event and a couple of relatively large donations from users but that's an one-off situation. you can't rely on donations unless you have stable organizational funding (and then you even have other problems like the organization threatening to pull funding if you don't do something they want, etc.), meanwhile software sales have been relatively consistent for the past year (and consistently growing) and there is no unrelated pressure to succumb to like with organizational funding. that's passive income you can rely on to an extent so it helps the project greatly

besides, I plan to maintain this project for several decades and compete with proprietary daws like logic, so having a "business plan" that will work in the long term is one of the top priorities for me (and my financial health) and for the project. if you are involved with free software, you see software getting abandoned all the time because the developer doesn't make a living from it - this is also why most free software projects are hobby projects and can't offer serious support. I don't want to be one of those projects. meanwhile Paul from ardour seems to have been smart about it and look how successful ardour is as a professional quality DAW, and from what I can see he doesn't have to do extra jobs to secure an income. that's a win-win situation for the project's users and its developers. the current model has been proven to work by ardour (and now by zrythm too) so it seems like the best choice for me, at least at this stage. who knows, maybe in the future there is a zrythm foundation or company and I could get enough funds from donations/investments/other ventures to even hire people. I think Paul has talked about this as well but audio development is not something you can expect tons of volunteer work for, unlike web technologies, so consider that as another reason to have a proper "business plan" for longevity

but you are basically asking me to find another job as an income source and donate the rest of my time to you with nothing coming back to me or going into the longevity of the project. I don't blame you for wanting good things for free but I think your request is unreasonable given the current circumstances. if you have any convincing arguments for dropping this "paywall" (in quotes because you can always get it from your distro or things like AUR or Geekos DAW (https://geekosdaw.tuxfamily.org/en/) or kxstudio eventually (https://kx.studio/Repositories) or build it yourself for free) that would benefit me and this project (and in turn its users) at this stage I would be very interested to hear them

someone suggested that the project would be more popular if the binaries were free but I don't think that makes a difference and also popularity alone doesn't guarantee quality. not to badmouth LMMS, I think it's a great project, but look at it as an example of a project that is popular but from what I can tell lacks manpower (correct me if I'm wrong) due to having practically no funding, and compare that with ardour which employs 2 full time developers and gets constant fixes and updates, even after 2 decades. at least in the DAW/audio space, this is what the situation seems to be like

one idea that was brought up was to have ads in the free binaries and provide the paid binaries without ads but I'm not so fond of it