Which developers are a safe bet for longevity.

[martinjuenke]

Waves. 25th aniversary anybody?

IK Multimedia

[syntonica]

Steinberg. Love them or don't care: They survived some ruff times and don't seem to stop.

Yamaha. 'Nuff said.

[DCrown]

I don't think there's a safe bet, everything can change immediately, no dev is excluded from the right to stop development, sell his company or die like everyone one day.
Will Waves continue after Valentine Waves will die one day? No one knows.

[Tj Shredder]

There is a save bet. Its called open source. Any developer who does not need copy protection and releases as open source can at least be adapted by the community to new processors, CLAP and new OS… Look at Surge. When it was released into open source, it evolved into something better. There should be a law to encourage developers to open source abandoned projects…

[Fannon]

There is a save bet. Its called open source. Any developer who does not need copy protection and releases as open source can at least be adapted by the community to new processors, CLAP and new OS… Look at Surge. When it was released into open source, it evolved into something better. There should be a law to encourage developers to open source abandoned projects…

Surge is a good example where this went well. And I open sourcing abandoned projects sounds like a good idea / move from the developers. At least users can then care for their own.

But for one sucessfull Open Source project there are probably thouthands of abandoned and unsucessfull ones. It's really difficult to get proper development done on Open Source if you don't earn money with it. Then you need a day job which leaves you enough energy and time to do that.

My feeling is that a good commercial model is also in the interest in the users of something. If it's worth something to you, you should ideally also be willing to pay something for it or to contribute somehow. Often only then a project can maintain itself well over time.

But there are for sure many Open Source project which got this done very well and also found some sources of income.

[Tj Shredder]

Look at Airwindows. There is no contradiction of open source and commerce. We as mere users need to get into an habit of supporting the tools we use.
Kushviev Elements is another example. The dev claimed it was the best decision ever he made to open source it. You can still put a little paywall up for builds like Ardour is doing it…
Patreon is as well a good way to monetize open source projects…
Open source is free as in speech, not free as in beer. There ain‘t no such thing as a free meal…

[DCrown]

I obviously forgot Open Source.
It's a good alternative

[martiu]

Native Instruments

[martinjuenke]

Waves
IK Multimedia
Native Instruments
Softube
Eventide
Moog

[SHall1000]

Given the news on Soundspot…..

https://synthanatomy.com/2023/06/sound ... iness.html

a new rule for me is avoided the suspiciously cheap.

[ChamomileShark]

Given the news on Soundspot…..

https://synthanatomy.com/2023/06/sound ... iness.html

a new rule for me is avoided the suspiciously cheap.

I was thinking the same, but then some companies do "amazing discounts". Examples Eventide, SSL, Plugin Alliance, Izotope and I don't think they are going anywhere.

[BBFG#]

Given the news on Soundspot…..

https://synthanatomy.com/2023/06/sound ... iness.html

a new rule for me is avoided the suspiciously cheap.

I was thinking the same, but then some companies do "amazing discounts". Examples Eventide, SSL, Plugin Alliance, Izotope and I don't think they are going anywhere.

Bait and trap companies like these are also something I try to avoid. What we use to read was "you don't own the software, you just license its use". Now they're implementing without comment that the software owns us.

With MS and Apple demanding new machines to run on and app developers coding their software to specifically not run on anything else,
"Longevity is open source."

Flatpack and CLAP seems the most promising...

[Gribs]

None of them. Software devs come and go.

[audiojunkie]

None of them. Software devs come and go.

FIFY ---> "Re: Which developers are a safe(er) bet for longevity."

[BONES]

There is a save bet. Its called open source.

Open source is a very mixed bag. Some projects never get finished, others remain in limbo for decades. The only really successful open source experience I've had is with Blender and they took more than 20 years, with a couple of disastrous decisions that almost did for the project, to stumble upon a business model that allowed them to properly compete with commercial applications.

Given the news on Soundspot…..
...a new rule for me is avoided the suspiciously cheap.

Who cares? It won't stop me using Union or Halcyon in pretty much every song. SoundSpot never update anything anyway, there stuff has always been abandonware - they release something , then move on to the next thing. That doesn't bother me in the slightest, especially when I'm pretty sure I've never paid more than $10 for any of their plugins.