The web interface works, though it’s the open source version, so no plugin store or pedalboard sharing
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Does it really work with 5V ? Because it could mean that you can power it with a USB powerbank if you have a “USB to DC” cable. That would make this pedal usable for busking.
Wait could this work with the dwarf?!?
Yes, it does. I’ve actually powered it with a pd type powerbank.
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Meaning?
So, here we have philosophical thing … With IP, we have a concept of possession. Yet, with open source, how is it that anyone can have (possess) the code, but not own it? In every real sense, if it’s in their possession, they own it. Right?
Only in civil law do things like copyright, patents, title, holdership, etc. have any meaning. Otherwise, it’s a legalistic fiction, which we can choose to believe in, or not.
Then comes along Copyleft, in the spirit of RMS and GNU. Here, in essence, we have a legal mechanism which uses copyright to ensure, effectively, that NOBODY owns a piece of software … This is perhaps another farce, but it makes a lot more practical sense if you ask me.
Nonetheless, we have the term Intellectual Property and try to apply it to open source. Of course, I should hope most people realize that if the idea isn’t a secret, at least in part, ones claim to it is just that, a legalistic claim–which you might have to fight for in court should it ever be challenged.
Therefore, if we’re worried about protecting our “IP”, we’d be wise to avoid open source and instead keep “trade secrets”. Propriety software makes all the sense in the world if this is your concern.
Which brings us to MOD … Either you’re open source or you’re not.
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It would be nice if there is there a way for MOD to offer a “survivor’s software bundle” with all the plugins, documentation, and user software possible as either a download or on a thumbdrive or DVD for purchase, to help fund the last units and/or next phase.
I and others would gladly contribute for this and it might help everyone. Win-win!
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to clarify a few things…
the entire MOD stack (that goes into making the OS images) is opensource in the truest sense (as declared by OSI) with the exception of:
- OS build system (what puts everything together, but mod-plugin-builder is based on it so anyone with enough time and patience could figure that out, there is a live-usb ISO image that uses the same too)
- device “controller” firmware, what we internally refer to as HMI
there are of course some device/cloud keys, but those are not source code.
and a few plugins, but those are not the part of the OS image.
and on the other topic, IP and opensource can surely go together.
there was the somewhat recent case of muse group buying audacity, which is an opensource audio editor, they essentially bought the IP. It involved contacting every developer that contributed to the source code and having their permission for a license and ownership change, but they were able to.
muse group now owns the audacity IP, and they can do with it whatever they want (independent of we liking it or not too).
the idea of GPL is not so much that no one owns it, but more that everyone owns it.
software that is released as GPL (and other similar licenses) can be used, modified, sold and all sorts of things, by everyone. the condition is that you share back the same way.
there are cases of software that has source code public and available to see, but with restrictive license on what you can do with it. I tend to call that “source available” instead of “open source”.
and anyhow this is not a black and white matter.
similar to this but on desktop, you can have opensource DAWs loading proprietary plugins, or proprietary DAWs loading opensource plugins.
Mixbus for example is a commercial fork of Ardour (an opensource DAW) with its own proprietary plugins thrown in. Is Mixbus opensource? mostly yes… you can build the whole DAW and place the proprietary bits inside.
There is also the case of “opencore” business models, where a core of a product is open but extensions to it are not.
And lets not forget that even with all software opensource, there are always parts that are not. the bootloader cpu init for rk3399 and imx8mq used in Duo X, for example, these are binary blobs for which we do not have the code for.
for the case at hand, the important parts that can be reused outside of MOD are fully open - the audio server, the host, the web interface, the big majority of plugins… these are the things non-MOD products would typically reuse. plugins originally made for MOD that are opensource can be (and are) used on other products or general purpose desktops.
the minor details that are not open are for a potential protection against easy fakes/copies (though I dont deal with that part of the business, there might be more involved).
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Right, these thing surely go on. However, it’s adventures in legal-land. It’s fiction … My main point is chiefly this, and not only that, it countervails reality in so many ways.
For instance, here in the west, patents and copyright are generally enforceable. Yet, try to go to China and have them observe the same laws and claims thereof. It’s very hard.
Even still, whether in the west or east, these protections only have jurisdiction over events which take place in commerce. What if we simply want to rip something off for non-commercial purposes? It becomes very hard to enforce.
I personally think we can do something better with ourselves than stake our value/worth on IP.
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See, when companies regard a product roadmap, or their marketing plan as undisclose-able, precious IP, that’s when I think there’s a problem. The reason being, is that a brand’s success isn’t really about innovation, or outsmarting the competition; it’s about trust. A brand can weather all kinds of things if it’s customers have trust in it.
Right now, I’d say this is your main problem. At least it surely is for me.
So here’s the big question:
If you were to do it all over again–reboot, let’s say–what would you do?
Would you continue down this path of creating an ecosystem that relies on hardware you’re not able to produce? Rather, would you do something different?
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“We believe that we always have the backers in mind but I understand if it doesn’t always feel that way. How do you feel that the ground root supporters have been sacrificed? what can we do better?”
From one of the mods in the previous thread that I can no longer reply to on…
Here’s the final example of sacrificing your ground root supporters and especially the tier 3 people who were willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and help the cause. We are left with nothing while you took our cash and sold our devices to new retail users so you could get more cash.
It’s pretty damn hard to try and be supportive anymore when this has happened. Sure, some of you who at least have your device can be all supportive to try and share patches etc which is great to see! ModDevices have also stopped me from risking my money on any more innovative crowdfunding companies. This is the first one out of quite a few that I’ve supported, have taken my money and given me nothing including at least one covid times project. It just goes to show you can’t trust companies that appear more established as opposed to solo creators doing it all off of their own back.
Sorry, my support for this company has run dry after years of waiting, their dubious business decisions and now this is the outcome. Never again. Will I get my Founders Edition one day? Would be something at least but I’m not hopeful. Lesson learnt.
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I just ran through the investment papers. What is missing is a sense of realism and tangible info. There is no reference to what went wrong (mea culpa?) and how this can and will be avoided in the future. No assesment / reference underpinning sales (realistic?) and profitability (cost structure?). I adore my Mod Duo X, but as someone with quite some experience in financing structures - the way this is presented now seems like shooting the breeze … I really hope you can do a better job and keep the Mod model alive in the future.
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** Opinions expressed here are my own for the sake of discussion and not those of the company **
The OS and a lot of plugins can already be implemented on other hardware and they already are so it does not rely on mod hardware.
However, the thing that I think is missing from the experience on other hardware is access to the store and sharing. I would love to see in the future, the ability for other hardware to run the OS with the user having a MOD account that they can use to authenticate plugins from the store and to share content. Much like how smartphone manufacturers can implement android and their customers have easy access to all the apps in the Google play store.
This would still require the company to still exist obviously to host the store and would require a significant amount of development to get everything working that way so here’s to hoping that MOD can get back on its feet and make this happen sometime in the future. I don’t see a way that can happen with just the community since hosting these platforms costs a lot of money. Though what is being done already without the plugin store can easily continue with the community and other ways of sharing can be used but they will likely be a bit less user friendly
I see a lot of suggestions made in this thread like “why didn’t you just do this?”. Well most of them are really good ideas and almost all of them were things we already thought about exhaustively. The fact is, everything takes time and money and in most cases, we wanted to do those things, they just hadn’t been done yet
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I don’t want to diminish your frustration because it’s totally valid.
I just want to explain that the “cash” that was taken was use to develop and produce the product, the problem is that it turned out later to not be enough cash because everything became more expensive, so the choice had to be made. Does the company spend the remaining cash making a few more devices and go bunkrupt? or does the company start selling to retailers, to make more cash, which can be used to make enough devices for all of the kickstarter backers.
That’s the reality. The money from kickstarters was NOT enough to make everyone a device. So you need to raise more money. If the investment fell through, and you can’t sell to retail, then how do you propose raising the funds to make the devices?
As you can see from the update, the management were working for no salary and the team were working with months of late salary. Nobody was putting cash in their pockets. Everything was being put towards trying to make more devices. I’m sorry it wasn’t enough. If anything, I would think you would hope that the company could have sold a lot more devices to retailers because then there would be more money to make your device
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Thanks for the reply and look, I totally understand the decision. It’s just rough that the initial supporters of the cause and the ones most patient were burnt. Seems very unfair.
Working for no money sucks ass too but yes, as the end consumer, traditionally this should not be part of the equation.
Let’s see what happens but the track record, I’m obviously dubious. Sucks I no longer feel comfortable supporting creative start ups as a byproduct.
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It does seem, but it is not that simple.
It would have been unfair if we were selling brand new units now at the same price we sold to backers.
If that was the case, backers would have made a pre-purchase purely based on goodwill and belief.
But the case is different.
Units were pre-sold at half-price or even less in many cases. That is the bet made when crowdfunding.
The company needs to overcome a challenge to reach the shelves. It is not just money. It is also engineering, coding, marketing, supply, and production.
The company then offers the chance to get the product at a small price in exchange for entering the risk of failing the challenge. The heavy discount is paid by the backers with their assumed individual risk.
The fact is that, since we opened the campaign, the world became a different place. And the conditions to overcome the challenge changed a lot as it all became more difficult and prone to failure.
When conditions changed, we did not ask for more money from the backers. We asked for more time and patience and we, the shareholders, put the money ourselves.
We could have closed down in Q1.2021, once the fundraise collapsed. 75 beta units would have been shipped and that is it.
Instead, we opted to contact the community and expose the new conditions in which we considered we had a working plan. That plan included the private shareholders and founders making further investments and employees sacrificing part of their salaries to keep the company running, buying materials, and selling to higher-paying customers in parallel to the delivery of the crowdfunding units.
Unfortunately, the conditions kept worsening and it did not fully work out. But at least, instead of shipping only 75 crowdfunded units, we shipped more than 500.
Don´t you think this is a partial win for the backers?
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It’s not true. We presented the tier options so that we could have time to fulfil all the orders. We didn’t know we couldn’t do it, we believed this would allow us to do it.
Nobody intended for that to happen to the tier 3 backers. Also, for context, most of the team had to apply for unemployment including me
We didn’t really have a choice. There were no guarantees or promises of any reward. We were just doing our best to make it happen for the community
Non of us had the facts. Things unfold over time
It is important to MOD too as expressed by Gian
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We are not proud of this situation of the expression.
But refunds have been made to those who requested.
Are you a backer of the expression pedal?
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Guys, it is what it is.
Let’s move on with positivity.
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That’s a good suggestion. I just wanted to try to dispell any ideas that we acted at the expense of the backers. We just did our best and conntinue to do so
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