Try 3 investors and two stores….decent data set. These are companies that should have been layups. A bad pitch is a bad pitch. Are you telling me that they suddenly turned around their pitch last minute, having basically used the same pitch for years?
Ok, so @dreamer please, tell me, what do you do for a living? Are you in product development? Engineering? Have you ever released a product? You can go to stores now and buy 6 products I’ve worked on in the last 3 years, right now, with contributions to open source on GitHub. Open source has never been a liability for any of our products. No distibutor has ever said that “oh, you have a lot of open source code and are running Linux, nope.”Have you actually worked in cradle to grave product life cycle management? Please, tell me, how much do you actually know about what it takes to get a product out. I can tell you this because this is my job. I can tell you why each failure I’ve worked on failed, and I’ve learned to actually take ownership for my mistakes.
There are very interesting points raised in the comments above, the discussion is very interesting.
I knew MOD for quite some time being a Linux user (and audio user) myself for years.
One of the main reason that convinced me to buy the Dwarf, beside the tech aspect and the great idea behind, was indeed the Free software aspect and the community vibe which led to concept like pedalboard sharing, forum support and so on.
Frankly, the philosophical aspect played a huge role, i am not sure if i would have spent more than £400 for a guitar pedal ever.
This is also one of the reason why I am still here and i even pledged some money into this cause.
I hope the Mod Team don’t give up on Free software and insist with pursuing the open approach.
I know Linuxaudio is still catching up and it’s not attractive like the server side of things where linux is a goldmine. I also do understand the production of physical hardware introduces even more challenges and dependencies compared to the only software development realm.
However thanks to the effort of projects like MOD or Ardour for example I believe a success with open source audio it’s still possible.
My really 2 cents here…
Speaking of Ardour, maybe one (additional) point forward for the MOD team would be to open up the plugin store for LV2 plugins built for amd64 devices as well, just as a central place for the Linux audio community to provide a store for commercial plugins. This might attract more developers because the target audience is not limited to the small crowd of Duo/Dwarf owners, but to all Linux users.
While this might add some development overhead, this might still be a small extension and AFAIK there is currently no other (commercial) LV2 plugin portal, so the MOD plugin store might evolve to that central place.