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.
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.
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:
Files: 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”.
Yes, thats my point. It is absolutely fine by me if he does not release the source. For most users it already is free (no cost), as you stated. And that is a big gift for the low budget amateur musicians out there.
vital source code doesnt appear to be listed in any repository to my knowledge and if my understanding is correct, under the GPL said source code must be maide available and a link provided to enable access to said code. additionally irrespective of platform, the GPL must be included in a human readable form. you cannot class a product as propriety under the GPL( any code that is proprietory should be clearly identified as such).Things get a bit messy if you are developing for multiple platforms using completely different code to acheive the same result. ( on a different subject, Microsoft are rumoured to be in the process of rewriting the Linux code base so that they can claim proprietory rights over the OS).
As far as I know (but I am not a lawyer) a GPL’ed program source code can be distributed as binary without source.
As long as the source code is not published, there’s no problem with GPL2.
Getting the source code of a GPL program is actually the whole point of the GPL (version 1, 2, 3 or any later). Let me quote the preamble of the GPL2 license ( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html ):
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
I believe the licenses you are referring to are permissive open source licenses, like MIT, BSD or Apache, which don’t require you to publish source code for a program binary.
As far as I know (but I am not a lawyer) a GPL’ed program source code can be distributed as binary without source. As long as the source code is not published, there’s no problem with GPL2.
Completely wrong. As long as the software is not redistributed at all there is no requirement to release source under GPL 2 and GPL 3. Software may be distributed as binary but if you send an e-mail requesting the source code they are then required to provide it.
If you take a GPL program and make your own changes, you do not have to comply with the license until you release the program to someone else.
Oh wow, those GPL licenses are a major oversight if you ask me. I guess these are still from when there was a consideration to make the software opensource, but at the moment of publication all of these references should have been scrubbed. And most definitely not included in any downloadable packages.
It depends on the question if he uses open source code for his product. As soon as he is using one line of open source code which is under GPL he need to release his code as well under GPL.
That is not the case if he utilized libraries of OpenSource. Then he just would need to declare those and obviously he cannot claim copyright for the libraries.
So I am not sure if it is really GPL because of he is reusing some other GPLed code or what the intention was. Using GPL when you do not plan to release it as source does not make any sense.
As an aside(not strictly vital related) Matt has worked on another project, Hyperion, which is available from tracktion.com , that particular project however is NOT open source to my knowledge, its is a very deep synth and is very CPU friendly having regard to its capabilities when stretched to its limits.
