Dave Smith Instruments SYNTHESIZERS

> In a synth world where it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate 
> your product from the next
> guy's, open source software is one thing that could really set you apart. 
> How about it, Dave?

This might indeed bring a few new customers. But most likely not enough to 
cover the cost of the additional people for the manufacturer's support 
department.

Or do you really think that customers wouldn't expect support from the 
manufacturer for a third party OS or would not blame him for problems caused 
by 3rd party OSs?

"Hey, Dave, OS 0.1 beta from well known list member X adds a lot of 
fantastic features to the PEK. Unfortunately it causes my PEK to 
occasionally freeze and sysex transfer to downgrade to an older OS was 
promised only for version 0.2.
X unfortunately doesn't reply to my mails atm, I think he is on holiday / 
didn't pay his provider / is a little distracted after his divorce/his pet's 
passing/his boyfriend's unexpected pregnancy / can't be bothered with bug 
reports atm cause he's already developing another set of fantastic addons / 
...

So I thought that DSI could help for once. I suppose it takes only a few 
minutes to recompile, interpret and debug his uncommented C++ code" ;)

Things like that have never happened in the past and will never happen in 
the future.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Wiltshire" <tom@...>
To: <DSI_Evolver@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 16, 2010 9:43 PM
Subject: Re: [DSI Synths] DSI Evolution?



On 16 Oct 2010, at 19:32, Dustin D wrote:

> Show us that you care after the initial purchase and you have customers 
> for life. I feel that synths are too valuable to be disposable and need to 
> be updatable. Is it possible to open source the programming to the 
> community if DSI doesn't have the resources?


This is something I would really love to see. I genuinely believe that 
people would buy *more* DSI gear not less if it were opened up in this way. 
If I could rewrite the software for (say) the Prophet08 or PEK, I'd sell my 
granny to get one. As it is, I don't particularly feel the need to own one.

Even if it weren't done on current products, you could open source the code 
for products that were no longer supported and no longer in production. If 
there were enough people out there who loved them, you can be sure there'd 
be all kinds of interesting stuff got done.

In a synth world where it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate 
your product from the next guy's, open source software is one thing that 
could really set you apart. How about it, Dave?

T.