Re: [Jack-Devel] FOSS & stuff (Was: Re: The Situation(s) With JACK)

On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Phil Rhodes <[hidden]> wrote:

>> 1) as was already noted, its clear at this point that talking about
>> "Linux" as an OS is a mistake.
>
>
> Then it's an extremely common mistake.

It is. And an extremely unfortunate one. Alas, "linux" is a convenient
shorthand that serves a purpose for some things. If two actual
software geeks were discussing things, then saying "linux" often makes
a lot of sense. But when talking to end-users about things they want
to do, or know if they could do, its really a (very common) mistake.

When ProTools was first released for Windows it was certified by
Digidesign for one PC only (a specific model from IBM). When I first
came across this information (a long time ago), I thought it was
laughable and indicated how stupid Digi were. These days, I think its
a sign of how much respect for their users they (once) had.

> See? (and actually I disagree, I've been doing media on computers for ten
> years and I hadn't even heard of one of the things you mentioned).

Because as noted, someone paid a lot of money to hide it all. And with
good reason, because if you had done any development targetting media
professionals such as yourself, you would have spent quite a lot of
time confronting what to do about it all. So be glad for the massive
subsidy that Windows and OS X media support gets from their respective
companies' other endeavours, and rightfully lament the fact that no
such spending exists for Linux.

> There have been comments in this thread to the effect that people are
> unaware of the elegance or capabilities of Jack. This is rather like saying
> that people are unaware of the elegance (if any) of Directshow, which is
> clearly ridiculous. Nobody cares. Nobody should have to care. It is
> irrelevant.

Users want to be able to route audio from one application to another.
You can't do that with anything that is part of Windows. You can't do
that with anything that is part of OS X. This is a user-driven desire,
intended presumably to serve user-driven goals and workflows. The only
reason for JACK's existence, and the only reason to use it, is so that
you can accomplish this one, simple task that OS facilities do not
permit you do. That is what Stephane meant. How can that be
irrelevant?

You also talk a lot about users as though they are a monolithic group
with a single set of desires, requirements and habits. There's no
doubt that everyone prefers a better tool over a worse tool. But some
people want screwdrivers and some people want hammers. Some people
want to hire someone to use a power driver for them, and some people
don't even know that what they actually need is a saw. Some people
want Skil, some people want Bosch or Porter-Cable. Some people plan to
hang a picture on the wall, some people plan to build a house.
Discussing things as though there's a single approach to addressing
the many diverse needs of many diverse users is a bit
counter-productive. I think we can all agree that things should be
"better", but talk to a dozen users with different goals and the
meaning of "better" gets hard to pin down, despite every single one of
them being very clear about what would be "better" for them.

Anyway, a lot of this has almost nothing to do with JACK per se. The
JACK project isn't a project to fix the linux audio "stack", or
correct distributions' configuration issues. It remains focused for
now on its task targetting the needs of pro-audio and music creation
users and assumes a sane environment in which to function. JACK itself
creates some headaches, and we need to address those. The broader
issues you raise are not under our control, nor, I suspect, are they
particularly motivating to most of us (since we're apparently all
software geeks).

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