Synthstrom Deluge goes open source

[Rubin Farr]

https://forums.synthstrom.com/discussion/5280/deluge-goes-open-source

[Limo]

Very nice. And quite unexpected because I’d imagine a lot of their IP is actually in their software.

[chronical]

cool move, polyend should follow so we can mod our trackers..

[Limo]

6 minutes ago, chronical said:

cool move, polyend should follow so we can mod our trackers..

In an ideal world everyone should do this.

[auxien]

B version arriving next year

[TubularCorporation]

2 hours ago, Limo said:

In an ideal world everyone should do this.

And make the hardware open also. At least if it's taken out of official production.

[thawkins]

On 5/10/2023 at 5:33 PM, Limo said:

In an ideal world everyone should do this.

In a lot of successful open source projects, the software has become widely used by a lot of big and profitable corporations, who crucially do not pay or support the original maintainers.

In worse cases your permissively licensed open source software may end up helping someone commit genocide or other things that you as the maker do not really approve of. However it's all legal since you have licensed the code this way.

Coming back to the topic at hand: it's great for the Deluge project to gain popularity this way, but this kind of also opens the door to a huge company whose name starts with B and rhymes with Dillinger to take the designs and fire up their own production lines.

Sorry if this sounds a bit jaded, but coming from the software world it's kind of a sad reality that the high ideals of the open source initiative have pretty much been co-opted by profit seeking capitalism.

[Limo]

1 hour ago, thawkins said:

Coming back to the topic at hand: it's great for the Deluge project to gain popularity this way, but this kind of also opens the door to a huge company whose name starts with B and rhymes with Dillinger to take the designs and fire up their own production lines.

 

Yeah, its a daring move. I’m pretty sure a larger company can make that hardware a lot more efficient and hence cheaper than Deluge can.

[user]

I'll refrain from commenting on making open source tantamount to genocide. But one thing that might be a deterrent to big companies copying the deluge besides the kind of niche market and very involved hardware side of it is the fact that any additions or changes to the code have to be made open source as well. So commercial parties can't just pick and mix or make a proprietary version without publishing their work.

[zlemflolia]

On 5/13/2023 at 11:53 AM, thawkins said:

Sorry if this sounds a bit jaded, but coming from the software world it's kind of a sad reality that the high ideals of the open source initiative have pretty much been co-opted by profit seeking capitalism.

thats because even the purest Stallmanist FOSS ideals were nothing but liberal reformism to begin with.  only through socialism can we achieve true software freedom, or in other words, freedom for software users and engineers to control the means of software production

Edited May 16, 2023 by zlemflolia

[Limo]

6 hours ago, user said:

I'll refrain from commenting on making open source tantamount to genocide. But one thing that might be a deterrent to big companies copying the deluge besides the kind of niche market and very involved hardware side of it is the fact that any additions or changes to the code have to be made open source as well. So commercial parties can't just pick and mix or make a proprietary version without publishing their work.

This is true. The GPL is fantastically viral, unlike the MIT license Mutable Instruments used and that caused their code to end up in the Microfreak.

On the other hand, if Behringer could find a way to make the hardware cheaper (and I'm pretty sure it could, there's probably nothing special about the Deluge hardware wise) the field would be very much tilted in their favor, even with the software being GPL. The only thing that would prevent them from doing this is if the product is too niche for them (which it likely is).

[thawkins]

13 hours ago, user said:

I'll refrain from commenting on making open source tantamount to genocide.

I was referring in a roundabout way to the case of YOLO, in which a popular image processing technology has made its way to military and privacy infringing applications (https://medium.com/syncedreview/yolo-creator-says-he-stopped-cv-research-due-to-ethical-concerns-b55a291ebb29). I am sure there are other - less clear-cut - examples and in any case there is very little visibility into what particular software is running in the latest hunter killer drones or whatever other panopticon that is being built now.

I am also pretty sure that many militaries / bad actors do not give the tiniest shit about GPL licensing, since everything is top secret anyway, and the sums involved mean that they can probably afford to pay some fines or even buy the stuff outright.

 

Unless they start to use Deluges in Guantanamo Bay to torture inmates with EDM (instead of Metallica) it's probably not very pertinent to this thread, so sorry again for the derail.