Hi John,
Just to clarify, you talked about me 'avoiding buying EigenD'. I'm not doing any such thing; I've already paid for the full Pro subscription in the past and there have been no releases since my subscription expired. Incidentally, I've also spent over £5000 on your instruments and accessories (Alpha, Pico, Stage, etc.) and am looking to spend more again on a new breath pipe. This is all a massive commitment to me, since I'm the only bread-winner in our house of 5 and thus that money has involved real sacrifices elsewhere - I also haven't been on a holiday for the last few years for example.
Non-financially I've also tried to be involved in the community and help other users wherever my home situation allows (three kids under 5 take a lot of my time!), plus have already said that the work that I've been doing on trying to integrate EigenD and Ableton Live will be given back to the community as soon as I (or more likely Mark Harris/Geert through their very generous help) can get it into a state where that's practical, rather than the proof of concept kludge that I've hacked together at the moment. Hell, I've even offered to let strangers come to my house to play the instruments, not for any direct benefit to me, but purely to try and do my bit to expand the community and generate more Eigenharp players.
I've never said that I expect all subsequent work on EigenD to be without cost, and indeed aren't adverse to making donations to the foundation when I can, but your original post did say "The full current EigenD, Stage and Workbench software source code will be donated to the foundation by the shareholders of Eigenlabs and will become freely available as a combined system to all users.", so presumably you can see how people have reached that conclusion? Until today you've never said since your announcement of the foundation that continuing to subscribe would 'grease the wheels' in terms of getting that going; in fact you've never even replied to direct questions on here asking whether the wheels are even on, despite the fact that you've been here and answered other threads (the website outage and the guy wanting a refund on his Pico being the ones that spring to mind, along with your thread about the new breath pipes). Without any info on progress, even whether the foundation was to progress, how am I to know that you wouldn't dissolve Eigenlabs Limited, in which case my £140+ wouldn't have any impact whatsoever on the foundation, but rather would go to paying creditors. I'll stress that I sincerely hope this doesn't happen, but you have been very candid about how the company isn't making money, so isn't exactly unprecedented.
I know that the above probably comes across as very negative, and I really don't want to be seen as just moaning. I love the instruments and the community of users, many of whom have spent a lot more time than me in helping others and 'selling' the instruments to other musicians (Geert being the obvious example, but Antonio, Mike, Randy, Mark, Ian and others also contributing an awful lot). Likewise, I genuinely don't doubt your integrity and have a great deal of respect for you; it's obvious that you've carried on ploughing money, time and effort into Eigenlabs without getting a great deal back except a big financial burden and a lot of earache from the likes of me. However, railing at myself and others whose greatest crime seems to be asking what's happening seems rather insulting.
Anyway, I took this afternoon off work to do some playing while the kids are out at Grandma's, so I'm going to stop emulating my favourite XKCD cartoon (http://xkcd.com/386/), get some lunch and then do some much needed practice at actually playing some music! Repeat after me everyone… "Must resist opening workbench… must resist opening source code…."
Cheers,
Mark.
UK
