Those interested, PM me. If we come within range and William elects to sell, this train will be kept on the road. I already have a couple of devs in mind to approach for continued development. Details need to be worked out, but I need a solid bed of investors who are willing to make a minimum investment of $400.

So far we have more than 1/3 his asking price of $12,000.

I'm curious, with this and the open source venture, if you are able to raise that kind of cash, why not investigate simply hiring a programmer to make a plugin to your exact specification and forget Wuzik altogether? Nothing against Wuzik, but I would guess that it has maxed out a lot of its potential market.

Plugins die like everything else. Imprudent to expect otherwise.

Possibly, but the wusik engine has merit and is worth sustaining I feel.

Spend your $400 on Reaktor, Absynth or whatever. Rescuing Wusik seems naive and barmy; it is not 'that' good. It just seemed so when there was the illusion of a vision and commitment to the product by the original developer. In the current circumstances, how do you even know he'll make the source code properly available, that he'll honour its complete handover? How well is it documented? The 1.2 upgrade scam seems to indicate a certain standard of commercial conduct at work here; would not seem advisable to throw more good money after bad.

That would be one of my big concerns, what's the state of the code? It's a good idea to document everything properly, make things simple and fault tolerant, etc. But if he never intended for anyone else to see it, it could be an organizational shambles. A developer on an hourly rate could burn a lot of resources just trying to make sense of it all.

buying sourcecode and goodwill is a messy and risky business; and I mean even when it is done correctly with lawyers, contracts, proper legal entities and audit.

Here we have none of that. Just perhaps a CDROM of source and the say-so of a private individual that it will compile, that it is well-formed and large chunks of code aren't stolen from his provious employer (etc) and he does have a customer base of X users. I'm not making any accusations here, WilliamK might be a perfectly honourable guy. I am just saying there is considerable due diligence to be done before organising a group buy of the IPR. Let alone planning of how the ownership of the IPR and commercial destiny of a new organisation would then be managed and how the source will be protected from theft and kept secure. (amongst many other tricky details)

I have to admit that as a KvR member, I find this whole issue massively distasteful. I'm not sure whether the flurry of ideas regarding how to ensure Wusik's future are a sweaty, panicked hail mary pass or a first glimpse at a new way for an online community to work together to collectively solve a problem with a cherished tool.

That being said, as a Wusik user I hope you bastards pull a rabbit out of this hat. Best of luck!

The prospects are lead ballooning at this point..

RIP.

personally I'm not a user of wusikstation.. however have you considered contacting Computer Music Magazine or another electronic music magazine for funding? maybe one could cut a deal, release a version for a mag and then have the money to continue the commercial venture

either way I've noticed several hasty, halfassed, failed ventures from WK.. kind of sad too.. seems to me he needs to hire someone to handle business and marketing and someone to do customer support so he can just deal with what he does best.. programming. but thats just one vitamin's opinion..

I think that both the commercial and open source efforts are creative community responses to the conflict between people's belief in the instrument, and the loss of faith by many in its creator's business practices. We shall see. I am working and hoping for an outcome that works for everybody.

Let's assume I am an investor and I don't know anything about music.
Can you explain to me why should I invest my money and how am I going to benefit from it.

Bassballjg, I'm walking out the door right this minute, would you care to take up this discussion for a bit?

I guess, he (WilliamK) is the only one who actually can read and maintain his code.

It's usually typical for that kind of "genia".

And if that all is written in assembly (as he claims), then it is the case for sure.

Is it that difficult for someone to read someone else's code? I guess we would need to post the actual code example here & get feedback from other developers on the applicability of continuing on with William's work..

Sometimmes definately : yes.

But I think, that depends very much from the experience the reader has and the style the coder has.

In case of WilliamK, you meight be right. (I saw just some code and it looks pretty nice.) Assuming it is all written in that style...