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by gnu6 5399 days ago
"more than 8,000 people signed a petition that demanded the source code to Final Cut Pro 7 be sold to a third party"

I wonder that anyone would make such a short sighted demand. Apple should properly release the source code of Final Cut Pro 7 to the public under a Free Software license. That would prevent this type of thing from happening again.
1 comments
homosaur 5399 days ago
I'm not sure that there's enough free software developers that even have the expertise to work on something like FCP. If there are, then where's the GPL video editor that competes? Pro tools like that are still commercial only until someone proves otherwise in code.
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gatlin 5399 days ago
It would take a Herculean effort to start such a project, and it would be virtually guaranteed that 1) few people would trust it since it's not a name-brand and 2) it would be several years before it had feature parity. The social and technical inertia combined make it not a good use of time.
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rjbond3rd 5399 days ago
Big open-source projects always face both the obstacles you mention. What overcomes the barriers is someone who, regardless, wants to "scratch their own itch." Someone will do it but on their own timetable and terms.

I wish there were a centralized way to crowdsource-fund open source projects...

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CamperBob 5398 days ago
few people would trust it since it's not a name-brand

Fat lot of good it did to trust a "name brand" in this case.

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homosaur 5398 days ago
As long as Apple keeps selling old FCP to those who need it before getting the new Final Cut up to speed feature-wise, I don't see the problem. If you stick with the same old, ugly codebase forever you end up with kludgeware like Photoshop... or Windows. The mistake here was ever taking old FCP off the market in the first place until they got the new one fixed. I mean they are selling it for $300, so that's almost an admittance on Apple's part that the feature set sucks.
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sciurus 5399 days ago
I think the free software video editors have been too fragmented to produce one.

http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2011/07/15/the-glorious-history-of...

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cbs 5399 days ago
>If there are, then where's the GPL video editor that competes?

Not working on it, doesn't mean they don't exist.

It is the same place the os that Competes, and office suite that Competes and whatever else that Competes are. Nonexistant.

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yock 5399 days ago
How does a tool like Cinelerra compete with FCP's feature set?
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