[modulusprime]

Miller Puckette is the primary author of pure-data (pd)and the original author (while at IRCAM) of Max. In Max/MSP/Jitter, MSP is the DSP portion of the code, named in homage to Puckette. (Max itself is named in honor of Max Mathews.)

David Zicarelli's Cycling74 maintains the original Max tree, though their contribution far exceeds "maintenance". Puckette's pd is a rewrite of Max intended to transcend some architectural limitations; as its name suggests, its conception of "data" is more fully abstracted away from the C underpinnings still visible in Max/MSP. In my opinion, pd is a more mature architecture while Max is a more mature product.

As far as I know, the only drama in the timeline revolves around Opcode (particularly its sale to Gibson), which led Zicarelli to start Cycling74. Beyond that, my impression is of mutual respect.

The tradeoff between maturity and elegance is sometimes maddening, but both are worth exploring. Max has a 30-day trial and pd is gratis/libre.

Some development history, including detail possibly of interest to hackers: http://xavier.amatriain.net/Thesis/html/node77.html Miller Puckette: http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/ Max Mathews: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Mathews pure-data: http://puredata.info/ Max/MSP/Jitter: http://cycling74.com/