I think you’re paraphrasing an unofficial FAQ document, that was not written by Matt 
That is correct, I wrote the FAQ 
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@unfa If it doesn’t go open source, you’ll have to update your Patreon cover or abandon Vital 
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I would have been fine with this too. Although with Zyn there was always full disclosure that it 1) would be foss and 2) that it was being witheld until he made his development costs back.
The only reason I started watching was the statement it would be FOSS and its later connection to FOSS artist. When I saw those statements getting scrubbed, cagey statements about “no decision made” (after they were) and gaslighting (discord folk saying “it was never said it would be” despite there being git commits showing the retraction on the blog proving it was, in fact, once said) I took a huge step back and look on from a distance now.
For the people who don’t care about any of that (and seemingly most don’t, will gaslight and deflect the ones who do) it looks like a great synthesizer.
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So is it possible that Matt/his mods just saying it’s open source was just a bait-and-switch? If that’s the case, then that is not cool.
I just want something FOSS with no strings attached. No account or anything
And FYI, Zyn-Fusion is still $45
I don’t know if I ever saw this unofficial FAQ page. And is it possible that Vital will ever be 100% FOSS? Also, Matt said something about smaller plugins on the Vital home page. Are these standalone plugins or they extensions for Vital’s functionality? And here’s the really important bit: will they all be free (maybe even all open source)?
I mean it has wavetables but it doesn’t seem like the same thing because of the lack of those warp modes and stuff, as well as it looking a bit less pretty. It does look like the FM synthesis and FX section is more advanced, though.
Will he ever release the source code and make it 100% free (apart from maybe the speech-to-wavetable thing if he never implements a version that works without Internet)? The quiet removing of the mention of Vital being open source from the blog and the gaslighting from people on Matt’s team, at least according to the other guy, makes it seem like that would be unlikely. I hope Matt comes out with a statement about all of this in the very near future if it hasn’t happened between me making this topic and now.
But surge addresses this point, which sounded important to you. You can learn to code a better interface 
Open source is great and important. But it’s just one model for software development and distribution.
I have a feeling that most people who want “open source” really want “free” because they have no intention of contributing in any way.
There are some really great open source synths available, but that’s somehow never enough.
Of course, if Matt really said that Vital would be open source at some point, that should be addressed. Because of Helm, I always assumed it would be, but I never saw an official statement.
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It was originally going to be open source as per the original announcement:
And for those wondering, this new synth will be open-source and pay-what-you-want like just like Helm
The blog post was edited and this comment was removed, though. It was not formally addressed, but by the time the account system was implemented it was clear where it was headed. Since you have to log into an account to even use the plugin.
I don’t mind it being freemium if it’s possible to make it open eventually when sales die down. Surge has insane amount of activity after going open and it breathed a lot of life into the community. It takes gusto. I’d like to see Helix also go open since it’s on life support. However I’m reminded of Minecraft; was originally supposed to be open source eventually but it blew up in popularity and it will never happen.
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Only the beta version required logging in; that requirement was removed as of 1.0. It will nag you to log in on startup but clicking off the login prompt will close it.
Notch said this in relation to when Minecraft was finally dead. Minetest has come a long way though.
No, people want open source because it was stated it would be several times.
There are some people who have special needs that may require a special recompile or a particular patch that isn’t interesting to upstream. For example MOD-DUO and Zynthian users which are basically just Raspberry Pi’s with special cases and interfaces so you can pre-load your synthesizer and carry it around on a dedicated box. I was also on a special linux distro for some time (Alpine) which did not support glibc and so proprietary plugins are literally impossible to use there (you have to recompile things, or side-load something like Ubuntu in a docker image.)
There are also of course those who do not contribute but do read.
It has become weirdly common (and tolerated) to shit on the open source-y’s and I’m not sure why its put up with.
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There has been some misunderstanding over the open source concept in that, because of poor choice of wording in describing the concept, people associated it as meaning free as in free beer when in fact the free element refers more correctly to freedom to inspect and optionally modify the underlying code. There is nothing in the associated open source licensing models preventing the developer from charging for the end product.
Yeah but they want you to login, and stay logged in during the entire time you use it. I’d much rather tick a box that turns it off (since you can always login manually from the menu), and stay logged out after initially downloading the presets (that IMO could have come with the installer).
It may sound old-fashioned, but I like my software offline and not making connections to remote servers. I used do write PHP/MySQL for a side job so I know just how much can be done with a backend server, you can collect data and make sense from it (trend analytics), build habit profiles of the users. So depending on how that information gets used, we still pay for it with sharing our data despite it being free.
That said, synths cost money and even if it costed $80 that would be pretty competitive since we’ve come to expect $200 price tags for soft synths ever since Model-E came out in 2000. So I guess it’s a small price to pay. Definitely beats needing a dongle inserted 24/7.
popularity usually wanes eventually, countless things tend to get abandoned; you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. like how the Simpsons are eternal.
Ardour and Zrythm have a model where you pay for binaries, but the code itself is still OSS and free to modify/build yourself.
Now with Vital they opted to go for advanced licensing models and subscription schemes. Which is fine of course and maybe will give them a more stable source of income for future development.
These kind of business models would be hard to do in a fully OSS project.
The login is used for text to wavetable (this does require being logged in always) and to download presets (you don’t need to stay logged in.)
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For me, open source is about freedom. I don’t learn a tool that might vanish some day without further notice. Of course, your downloaded VSTs will still work, until they don’t - bit rot is a real thing. And then noone, even those who know C/C++ and could, can fix it.
It’s not about whether I would or would not contribute to a particular project, but as developer it is infinitely calming that I could if the need arises. This is not hypothetical, I already debugged and contributed to FOSS projects - I am even in the process of developing an (open source) plugin myself.
Seeing the amount of polish of the GUI in Vital and the amount of capabilities, I can very well see that the developer invested a lot of work. The amount of plumbing you have to do, to make the GUI work (after finishing the already non trivial DSP code) and be so interactive is huge. So I can understand he wants to sell the binaries, so noone can take the source, fork it and publish binaries with full capabilities for free.
But I don’t see any diminished capabilities in the free(ware) version compared to the paid versions. Just more presets and wavetables (and some other things like TTS, which I find an odd feature). So I don’t understand the point of not releasing the source code. The source code could very well not contain any presets or wavetables.
Being a bit more open and upfront about whether Vital was going to become open source or not would’ve been great. I see some users who are quite alienated because of the way this was communicated. It also made others who carried the hype because of “… and it is going to be open source like Helm!” look bad.
And last a bug report kind of:
The current debian package still contains the file /usr/share/doc/vital/copyright, which explicitly says that Vital is free software. Please fix this, or otherwise distribute the source code for the Linux binaries, because as it currently is released, the debian Linux package violates the GPL license. It even has a GitHub URL to the non existing source.
I don’t believe that free needs to equal open source, and I think you’ve acknowledge the potential issue here …
So I can understand he wants to sell the binaries, so noone can take the source, fork it and publish binaries with full capabilities for free.
I do completely understand the importance and role of open source. It’s key to just about everything we do on the internet.
I think programming is an excellent and creative skill, and I actively look for opportunities to support developers by paying for software so that they can earn a living using their skills.
In the context of vital, if $25 is a stretch right now (and I can completely understand why it might be is these difficult times), then that isn’t a barrier to using this synth.
The current debian package still contains the file
/usr/share/doc/vital/copyright, which explicitly says that Vital is free software .
But it is free. There are also paid options available.
All the best
-Andrew
Free as in beer, not as in “free open source software”.
The license of the debian package is GPL “you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation”, I quote the full text here:
$ cat /usr/share/doc/vital/copyright
Format: http ://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
Upstream-Name: vital
Source: https://github.com/mtytel/vitalFiles: src/*
Copyright: 2019, Matt Tytel
License: GPL-3+
vital is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
.
vital is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with vital. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
.
On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General
Public License version 2 can be found in “/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3”.Files: debian/*
Copyright: 2019 Matt Tytel
License: GPL-2+
This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
.
This package is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http ://www.gnu.org/licenses/>
.
On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General
Public License version 2 can be found in “/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2”.