Re: Moving From ProTools to Linux? Good or bad?

Mike Rivers wrote:
Neil Gould wrote:
A few years back, I lost a chunk of money investing in Be, because I
could see why BeOS was clearly superior to any generic OS for media
production apps. That taught me a valuable lesson; it takes a
signficant volume of users to get manufacturers to invest in
supporting an OS, and media producers are not a large enough
population to get even a good independent idea off the ground.

As I recall, part of the tail end of the BeOS history was that TASCAM
took it over since they used it in a couple of their digital consoles
at the time. But that was at the time of the decline of the
small/medium format digital recording console (or recording console
for that matter) and eventually the console, and the OS, became
orphaned.

If I recall, Tascam used BeOS as an embedded OS for their console, but that
was still while Be was around. Ultimately, Palm bought out the OS in the
fire sale, my stock tanked, and I haven't heard anything about it since. I
think they sat on it to eliminate competitors getting hold of it. Now, look
at where Palm is...

What we have with Windows and OS X is a compromise,
where a sufficient population of users have been developed over the
last couple of decades that manufacturers have a shot at justifying
their investment. Where does Linux fit into this schema?

I think there's a place for a good turnkey Linux distribution that's
well configured for audio.

Sure... those folks that want to do multi-track virtual sessions over the
internet have few better options, if any. A friend sent me a link to one of
those projects... folks around the world performed "Stand By Me", and I
understand there is a classical project underway. We'll see if that idea has
legs, but, I doubt if that kind of thing represents a very large portion of
DAW users. OTOH, my experience with open-source apps is that one has to be
strangely motivated to maintain them. That's not to say that there is no
market for major apps... for example, MySQL is coming into its own after
many years, but a likely contributing factor is that all other serious
relational database languages priced themselves out of reach of too many
users and even many developers. But, unless all DAW software costs as much
as Nuendo, I can't see that happening in the audio world.

But somebody's gotta do it, and that
somebody probably wants to make some money from his or her effort.
Between applications, system configuration, user interface, and
documentation, I can see a hundred grand going into it. If you sold a
DVD for $200, would you find 50 customers?

Well, that would leave you $90 grand in the hole... ;-)

--
Best,

Neil


.

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