Closed Open Source?

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prongs_386

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I'm just curious if you've ever considered open sourcing Axe-Edit? I understand there is so much IP in the AxeFx that there'd be too much risk there. But is there the same concern with Axe-Edit?
Potentially a few more of the wishes could be acted on by the community?
 
prongs_386 said:
I'm just curious if you've ever considered open sourcing Axe-Edit? I understand there is so much IP in the AxeFx that there'd be too much risk there. But is there the same concern with Axe-Edit?
Potentially a few more of the wishes could be acted on by the community?
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The in-house experience and knowledge at Fractal seems pretty valuable to me. Plus supporting this as an open-source project would be a lot of work.
 
I guess my point is more that AxeEdit you can look at and replicate. AxeFx you can't look at an amp model and understand how to build that.

But absolutely supporting an open-source project takes time so the benefits have to outweight the cost.
 
prongs_386 said:
I guess my point is more that AxeEdit you can look at and replicate. AxeFx you can't look at an amp model and understand how to build that.

But absolutely supporting an open-source project takes time so the benefits have to outweight the cost.
Click to expand...
The Fractal team iterates on the UI in conjunction with the firmware releases. No open-source PR process could keep up with the pace at which firmware releases are created. If anything should be open-sourced, it’s all classes that represent the sysex messages and all enums that go with the models that are added.
 
I'm a big advocate of open source software, and the corollary of developers eating their own dog food, because I remember the 20th century days of every computer maker having their own proprietary Unix implementation and every single one of them sucked worse than what we enjoy today.

Fractal Audio is doing a stunning job of supporting their customers with hardware, software and firmware. I can see no upsides to them farming out what they do to a community, however enthusiastic they may be. If they find out they can't keep up with the job, maybe that'd be worth considering, but why f!?k with something that's working very well indeed?
 
Open Source ..... ??? ..... hmmmm ...

Axe-Edit is a client to Axe-Fx.
A client cannot be programmed without some fundamental knowledge of the host.

As far, as known, as good.

But ... knowledge of the host .... ?? ...

Did you ever run your own company ? ...

Did you ever earn your money producing a sophisticated good ...
... that is primarily based on your deep and fundamental knowledge about a not-so-simple subject or theme? ....

Would you share this deep knowledge to a „community“ ..... ???
and why on earth would you .... ??

And, just by the way, the Fractal Audio team does the very - and I mean very - best support to their products I‘ve ever experienced in a really long lifetime as musician.

So what ?
 
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OK, it seems people are reacting a bit negatively to this idea which is fine. The initial suggestion was purely from observing that there may be more feature requests than can be supported by the Fractal Team - this is normal, requests need to be prioritised, some might take the product in the wrong direction and should not be built and of the features the team are interested in perhaps some are too low priority to work on.

There are plenty of examples of open source commercial products that are for-profit. The Fractal Team and the community are great and have a good relationship, it seemed to me that the same community could contribute certain features giving Fractal more time to focus on the core products.

In a client-server architecture the client does not need deep knowledge of the server - it needs to understand the API that the server exposes. So this does create an opportunity to protect the core product while allowing clients such as AxeEdit to be built/extended externally. Although certain features will require changes to that API.

This was absolutely not any kind of complaint about the pace that Fractal moves at or any lack of support - they do a great job and this support is one of the main reasons they continue to be successful.
 
My own reply was not meant to be negative, but reading back over it, I can see how it could be taken that way.
 
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