Poll: How about an alliance against Apple strategies? (Catalina, OpenGL...)

[JCJR]

Unless a person is a masochist then something either has to be more fun than hassle to bother doing, or it needs to pay good enough to make a person put up with the not-fun hassle.

Different folks have different fun. Some actually like gui coding. Sometimes I really enjoyed gui coding especially maybe the first time I wrote a piano roll edit window. Maybe even fun the second or third time if there was some sane reason for doing the same thing over again. But having to do exactly the same thing in a different language with different api just to keep the same functionality you already had starts getting rather non-fun unless you are a specially weird kind of nerd. Not many people will keep at it for a long time for free because it stops belng fun.

Doing it for money you are motivated to add features you think somebody else might like though you personally will never use and would never write for your own use or recreation.

So I'm finally too fried to even think about doing it for money at any salary level. Too much trouble lately to me even doing anything except jsfx because the algorithms can be fun without having to dick with boring non-fun trivia.

In the silly jsfx I will sometimes add features somebody else might use that I would not. If it is not a lot of trouble to do so. Otherwise the user can edit the jsfx text and add any feature he wants. Jsfx is entirely open source and as long as reaper keeps running then jsfx will keep running.

If somebody goes to the trouble of compiling a vst or au for free, which is a lot more work, and might even spend more than trivial time adding user features he doesn't himself use for free, then that is verging on being too nice of a guy. If changing OS or plugin specs makes him have to do too many thangs that ain't no fun, then eventually it ain't worth doing for free. If the not-fun stuff gets too ridiculous then at some point it ain't even worth doing for money.

I'm just saying maybe some folks care about the 99 bucks or whatever but if apple didn't already take all the fun out of it with numerous non-fun hassles, notarization is maybe only the final straw for some folks and they really wouldn't mind the 99 bucks if apple hadn't already taken all the fun out of it.

[Vertion]

Since this market lacks its own open standards, it will always serve those who control the standards. Until you unite and take control of the standards you use (both software and hardware), this market will remain endangered. When the leaders among you take action, the others will follow.

[mgw38]

Since this market lacks its own open standards, it will always serve those who control the standards. Until you unite and take control of the standards you use (both software and hardware), this market will remain endangered. When the leaders among you take action, the others will follow.

One thing we learned over the last 25 or so years is that free markets are never really endangered. Even is a company appears to be in unilateral control of an entire market, disruptions in technology can (and btw eventually always will) shift the market out of the control of that company again.

Anybody remembers Silicon Graphics (SGI)? For much of the 80s and early 90s that company completely controlled the computer graphics market. It was believed at that time, that their monopoly was so strong that they would one day become the single most important company dominating the entire world. In the 1997 science fiction film "Contact", SGI is the company that builds the wormhole generator. The first 100 employees of SGI where treated like rock stars. I was working at ASU at that time and we had a visitor from SGI one day. He was introduced simply as "number 17".

And then PC graphics cards happened and within less than a year SGI went from single most important technology company of its time to virtually worthless in less than a year.

Same thing happened with Kodak when they completely overslept digital photography.

Point being, this notion that Apple is an evil corporation that is set out to control a market in order to dominate humanity is a fun conspiracy theory but it is not based on reality. They will never be able to really control the market and they know it. What they are doing is trying to use their current market power to move their market in a way that allows them to counter anticipated technological disruptions. Every major company is trying to do that in one way or another these days. They do that to try avoid the fate of SGI, Kodak and other companies who disappeared in an instant despite their market dominance.

[quikquak]

Corporation are controlled by the boardroom though. And their marketing tries its best to adjust the 'optics.'
I don't think it was personal computers that saved them last time they were in trouble.
Microsoft is the most dominant OS. But Apple is up there in the music/editing/publishing fields like it always was.
I hope we don't lose them.

[mystran]

And then PC graphics cards happened and within less than a year SGI went from single most important technology company of its time to virtually worthless in less than a year.

It's actually quite funny, since OpenGL was originally SGI's API, yet it was probably NVidia that benefited the most (and essentially killed 3DFx, the former king of 3D accelerators on PC) by embracing the OpenGL standard and essentially building their cards around the specification.

[adammonroe]

Apple's interest is to monetize, so this will never be implemented, because this can't be monetized in any measurable amount. Everybody forgets that eventual masterplan is to take 30% of all macos software sales, be it plugins or anything else.

Yes, this is the main point. I'm getting tired of these big companies creating exclusive marketplace monopolies and charging 30% to use them. It's not just Apple, but Google, Valve, ect. That's a HUGE percentage for effectively offering little in return. Ebay is getting greedy these days, but still, they are only charging 12%. I can host my own plugins for a fraction of 30% of the sales price. What's the point of distributing over the internet if the internet is just turning into a handful of giant tech companies operating as gatekeepers and tariff collectors?

[Vokbuz]

Everybody forgets that eventual masterplan is to take 30% of all macos software sales, be it plugins or anything else.

Do you write directly from Tim Cook's office? Otherwise how could you know that?

[Aleksey Vaneev]

Everybody forgets that eventual masterplan is to take 30% of all macos software sales, be it plugins or anything else.

Do you write directly from Tim Cook's office? Otherwise how could you know that?

My own common sense.

[quikquak]

Everybody forgets that eventual masterplan is to take 30% of all macos software sales, be it plugins or anything else.

I thought they dropped it to 10% now. Or is that just iOS?

[Vokbuz]

My own common sense.

"My own" and "common" at the same time?

[hibrasil]

Google's ANGLE project might help you keep using OpenGL code on macOS going forward https://github.com/google/angle

[vortico]

I'll admit I've only read the first post and not the following 21 pages, but has anyone considered pricing Windows and Mac builds differently, in order to 1) support Mac-specific development costs and 2) signal a message to Mac users that Macs are indeed more expensive to develop and users should consider this when purchasing Mac products?

We all know that Mac hardware is significantly more expensive than similarly-functioning Windows-supporting hardware by a factor of 25-100%, so I think it's fair for third-party developers to follow a similar pricing structure. I think it would be reasonable to charge 20-30% more for Mac versions of software. For example, your product could be marketed as MyCoolVST: $99 Windows, $139 Mac. This marketing strategy is commonly seen in desktop/mobile dual markets where the ratio is much more extreme, e.g. $13.99 for FL Studio Mobile and $99 (starting) for FL Studio.

VCV has no plans to do this, simply because purchasing a license for VCV plugins or VCV Rack for DAWs gets you a license for all OS's, but otherwise we would consider it.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

Of course a different price might make sense in the future. At the moment we are applying the same price to both operating systems, although the cost of development on a Mac is considerably higher - at least for us. It would become inevitable if Apple were to force their store, for example.
Maybe even before.