[Matroska-general] Doing business

[Steve Lhomme]

While I was reading this interresting (long) article I had an idea :
http://www.delilah.itcsalvemini.org/lust/GNU-Articles/New%20World%20Order.html

"I think that in general, people would rather pay for an easy-to-use 
product, than to get a product for free, and require expensive support."

To be able to spend time on a software you need money, or the project 
will evolve very slowly (unless you only have unemployed developers 
which tends to be less and less true within our small community). So one 
way or another we need to make business.

There are different ways and CoreCodec manages to make a few with TCMP 
but not enough at all. So we need to find other ways. Right now we have 
nothing to sell. The libraries or small existing free code can't be sold 
to anyone but people who don't know how to download binary builds...

So my idea is this video editor. There could be the engine (GStreamer) 
that is completely free (AFAIR it's LGPL) and the GUI to use this engine 
that would be sold (maybe with different versions, like a very basic one 
for a few bucks or even free and a huge one allowing all kinds of stuff 
like DVD authoring, burning CD/DVD, etc). IMO that could be business 
model that works (if only GStreamer is LGPL or anything but GPL). And 
that would also put more emphasis on the GUI which is IMO as important 
as the engine.

I'm not sure if the free/cheap version should be open source or not 
(could be). IMO it should offer the same things VDM can do with AVI and 
MKV support, not more. If it's open source, anyone could use it to make 
an alternative version to the big one. But in the other hand that 
require the same big amount of time we would spend on it. So it's very 
unlikely to happen... Also if we put the sources of the whole project in 
CVS I'm not sure you can only allow certain parts to be hidden to 
anonymous users. Anyone knows ? Can Subversion do that too ? Or that 
would mean to have a part in a public CVS and another in a private CVS 
(no anonymous access).