Kolin, you apparently read my post in the 20 minutes I had it up there before I decided it would be better for everybody to just delete it and get back to matters audio.
Unforunately you causght it befire I had a chance to delete it. I really don't want to get too heavy into this, but I'll pay you the respect to answer your post and your questions directed to me:What you are referring to as "communism" as I understand it, is the corrupted and perverted version of "communism" as practiced by political dictatorships such as the ex-Soviet Union, North Korea, and so forth. I'm referring to communism in the pure sense, uncorrupted by dictitorial greed. That is the model that those like yourself are really espousing when you talk about the move away from capitalism towards a stone soup model of communities that support each other by contributing to a common good. Open sourcing, pay only what you can afford on an honor system, contribute what you can to to the community whist the rest of the community contributes to you. It's life in a commune. That is the real, textbook definition of communism.
I'm not writing that idea off as good or bad in and of itself; it does sound lovely to the disaffected and disenfranchised. I'm not ascribing the negative connotations to that that one gets when they think of communism in the terms of a communist-pretending dictatorship in the mold of a Stalin or a Kim Jong Il. What I am stating is that it is a Utopian idea that just doesn't work. It will either be broken apart by the human spirit and the basic human instinct for individualism and entreprenurship, or it will wind up having to be imposed in a form that stifles such individuality, and then we wind up with the dictatorships that we now see barely holding together the few islands of communism that are left in this world. It's a failed idea. Nice on paper, but ultimately untenable in the real world.Anyone who feels that way is free to affect it, and do so very easily. All it takes is some self-discipline and an understanding that 90% of what these behemoths are peddaling to us are completly unnecessary to either survival or happiness.
Prices go up, quality goes down, because we as consumers allow it to. Prices for cable TV just keep going up and up and up with no *real* tangible increase in quality. Yet the bumber of subscriptions keeps increasing not decreasing. We are a society of materialistic drug addicts, and until we sober up and realize that the quality of the product called cable TV is just not worth continuous price increases, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
This is one thing that "old fogies" like me ( even though I still consider myself young, and only halfway through life, thank you very much) can see much easier than those of us half our age. My god, what do a husband, wife and two kids need with a 14-room McMansion with a $1500/mo mortgage? What a freaking waste of everything of real value that is. Why, for God's sake, does everybdy have to carry around a camera/internet portal/movie player/telephone with them wherever they go? Are the people that have this stuff actually any happier? Not that I can see. Hell, Kolin, you sure don't sound any happier - ore really any different, to be honest - than the hippies of the 60s and 70s, the cokeheads of the 80s, or the Kurt Cobain's of the 90s were. The only thing that's changed have been the styles.
If one wants to cut down the corporate structure, it's easy. Demonstate to them with your dollars and your lifestyle that your don't need or want them. Do without an iPhone. Do without a DVD player in an SUV, for chrssake. Do without the need to have 60GB of music with you wherever you go. Chances are you'll actually be happier to thave those burdens off your shoulders. The human race has done just fine without all that crap until just the past 10 years, thank you very much. They're just forms of drugs that we have allowed ourselves to get hooked on.
And do without means do without. It doesn't mean stealing. The huge number of illegal software and music downloads serves only to show "the corporations" that they are on the right track, because the demand is there. The day when people STOP downloading free MP3s or limewiring Waves Diamond bundles is the day when the companies need to start woorying and change their tune.A couple of things about that. First of all, in the grand scheme of things, Avid is just not that big of a company. No the entire Avid family could not fit on a bus, but comparitively speaking, Avid is just not in a class that anybody involved in business would call a "large corporation". 99% of the people in the US and Canada have never even HEARD of Avid. Or Pro Tools. or Steinberg. To call Avid a big monopolistic corporation is tanamount to calling the space shuttle a starship.
You may be too new here to know that I used to work as a developer, technician and engineer for a couple of companies that made/make state of the art audio and video software and hardware for the music, broadcast and movie industries (D-Vision Systems and Discreet Logic). A couple of my fellow engineers there now work for Sony Media (they went there when it was Sonic Foundry) working on SoundForge, Vegas and CD Architect, and I had a lot of contact with engineers and reps for many of the companies in the business (including regular contacts with Avid and Steinberg at the time.)
My company at it's largest employed some 50 people (only about half of which was the engineering staff.) Before we were bought out by Discreet Logic, we were streamlined to a staff of about 25-26 (I forget which). Our company was valued at that time as $20 million dollars. That sounds like a lot of money, but a major portion of that value was credit, salary, and fixed assets, none of which one can actually spend. Then subtract the few million that was still owed on VC and bank loans, and it goes real quickly. I got a measly $5000 out of that $20 million - actually only $3000 after taxes. Not exactly a windfall that made me rich
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When Sony bought Sonic Foundry (which is run out of a relatively small town in Wisconson, BTW), the purchase price was (if I remember correctly) about $17 million, and their staff wasn't much different in size than ours was. Sonic Foundry, one of the biggest names in our racket, was actually a very small company that COULD fit on a bus, and was worth what may sound like a lot to the individual, but $17 million is pocket change to a REAL corporation like Sony. And even today, "Sony Media Products" is really little more than a re-naming of Sonic Foundry. The main difference is that the entity called Sonic Foundry now has to pay their money back to Sony headquarters instead of individual venture capitalists and banks. Sony bought their assents AND their debts for the right to collect on the profits of their revenues. That's all.
To say that the company that makes Vegas is a huge monopolistic corporation called "Sony" is really just a misunderstanding of how the corporate puzzle is put together. Sony could just as soon sell the tiny company currently called "Sony Media Products" to someone else tomorrow as they could sneeze.I alreeady talked about one aspect of Sony. As for the rest of Sony and the companies you mention, yeah, you're right, those are huge comglomorates. My point was that the angsters like yourself tend to lump relatively small to even tiny companies lik Native Instruments, Steinberg, Waves, UAD, Avid, Peak, Cakewalk, etc. - in other words the companies that actually supply the software that we use daily in this racket - with "big business" or "corporate culture". There are several magnituides of difference, and the idea that just because there is a company or even a corporation means that there is this evil monopolistic corporate culture involved is just ridiculous. When I was at Discreet Logic things couldn't have felt (or ben run) more mom and pop entrepreneurial if we had bee running a corner grocery store.
And long befoe I ever worked there, there was a time when I was actually president of a corporation myself. Big fucking deal. I was also vice-president and treasurer. I was self-employed out of my house as an independant computer consultant, and it too a grand total of about $700 to file with an attorney and incorporate myslelf. Not exactly the big, bad wolf, now was I?And what to you really think Reaper's future plans are? Do you really think that they plan on staying an independant company that charges $40 on the honor system for their product? Crunch the math. They simply can't afford to stay in business that way. Even if they grabbed 100% of the market away from Digi, Steinberg, Cakewalk, etc and became the monopoly you so despise, there's just not a big enough revenue stream or profit margin to stay there with that model.
Eventually they will have three choices: go bust, IPO, or sell to a bigger company. My money is on the last one; get enough market share and (more importantly) brand recognition to become an attractive buy to someone else. Hell, he already did exactly that with Nullsoft, with Winamp and Gnutella, that's a business game he knows well.
There's no social or economic altruism there. It's entrepreneurism, plain and simple. I'm not knocking it, not in the least. I love entrepreneurism, and I wish those guys well, to be honest. But to mistake what Reaper is all about with a stone soup version of economic "community" (a.k.a. textbook communism) is just self-deception on your part.Ummmmm....what???....wow??? This is where your ramblings come out like ooze out of that self-proclaimed hole in your head, and I have absolutely no idea what the hell you're talking about there.
G.
