Have things cooled down now?
The products are completely separate
You can get it without charge from just about any and every Linux distribution.
You can get the source code without charge from ardour.org/download (or from our mirror repo on github).
You can get it (legally) without charge from anybody else who already has it.
The only thing you cannot do is to get a ready-to-run binary without charge from ardour.org itself. You can opt to pay as little as US$1 for that, however.
As I’ve said, its downloads are. E.g. here: https://community.ardour.org/download?architecture=x86_64&ty...
> The only thing you cannot do is to get a ready-to-run binary without charge from ardour.org itself.
This is what I’m referring to as a paywall.
For a casual Windows user, source code or Linux repositories are unhelpful, as the website itself states.
> You can opt to pay as little as US$1 for that, however.
A low paywall is still a paywall.
The Ardour "paywall" does not do that.
You may not like the "cost" of the alternative (e.g. finding someone else who already has the Windows version, or learning to build it yourself, or getting someone else to build it for you), but those costs are, I would claim, not part of the "paywall".
If you had said "ardour.org doesn't offer ready-to-run binaries unless you pay something for them", I would not even have commented.
You're saying "oh, well, they don't provide no-charge downloads, so it's paywalled" is a comment that to me basically ignores what makes libre software libre software.
I'd say the opposite is true, you can put content behind a paywall in one place, even if it is freely (libre and/or gratis) available elsewhere. Wikipedia has a page called "List of public domain resources behind a paywall" [1], this seems a nice example. To me Ardour binaries are another.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_domain_resource... .
Are the sunflowers "behind a paywall" in any functional sense? Does the fact that one possible place to get them requires payment mean anything when they are available at no cost elsewhere?
The functional sense seems very relative. For people who cannot go further, all sunflowers are behind a paywall. For people who can, it’s just that, i.e. they also have access to sunflowers not behind a paywall.
To be clear, I’d say the resident on the left (or Ardour for that matter) is in no way worse because they’re offering paid sunflowers. They have every right to do so. And something must be good about their offer if people are buying from them (location, authority, desire to support their business, perhaps all of the above).
Edit: added "(or greater)" :)
Also note that only a few linux distros are bleeding-edge (such as Arch-Linux, which will contain binaries for newly released package versions pretty quickly). But if you are on a non-bleeding edge linux distro, your distro's repos aren't kept up-to-date and so the advantage of the Ardour binary download is you get an up-to-date package without having to install a 3rd-party repo or build it yourself.
And we aim to release every 2 months.
People who pay monthly also get access to nightly builds, allowing them to test things out before release (useful for us, sometimes useful for them). Most of our alpha/beta testers, however, build it themselves, from source.
Also the "locking downloads behind a paywall" only applies to scores that users have uploaded to musical score social media sharing site musescore.com, but the desktop program MuseScore binaries are available for free on Win, Mac, Linux, BSDs via https://musescore.org/en/download. You can anyway post your scores anywhere for free. And there may be proprietary VSTs that you can pay to download via MuseHub, but MuseScore's baseline audio synthesis (as well as any free soundfonts you can freely download) are free.