I'm putting DirectQ temporarily on hold while I'm working on something for another passion of mine - audio editing. This has been an on/off hobby for quite some time now, and I'm getting the itch to do something new with it right now. I might release whatever I come up with or I might not; it's certainly a useful tool that I've seen people in other places looking for (if your curiosity is burning a little, hold fire for a bit - I'll reveal more when - and if - I get things coming together well).
Hopefully this won't take too long.
Some relevant points have emerged as part of this exercise, however.
Firstly, and I've said it before elsewhere, but I am of the opinion that the GPL can be an extremely restrictive license in certain circumstances. I'm feeling it with this current project; right now I have a certain amount of code taken from elsewhere, all of which is free, but none of which is GPL. I'm not willing to take risks on whether or not the licenses are GPL-compatible, so if I release this, it won't be GPL. This is a practical problem, whereas with the GPL the focus seems more on maintaining some kind of Free Software gene pool purity. The irony here is that the GPL mentality seems to have ended up being very right-wing, despite all best intentions (this, by the way, is one reason for a lot of my previous derogatory comments on Linux).
Just read the "what you should not say" section on the FSF site - Thought Police, anyone?
Secondly, the quality of tutorials on a lot of things leaves much to be desired. I found this with OpenGL, and I'm finding it now (to a greater extent) with FFT and spectrum analysis. The information available falls into two main camps; it's either very mathematically intensive or it's extremely basic. One thing I need to do is obtain a full spectral analysis of a Wave file - not in real-time, just the full file data. Good luck with finding anything that's useful for that. You can get some reasonably decent basic FFT material, but beyond there you're straight into the realms of Masters Degree level technical papers. The inbetween sweet-spot just does not exist.
1 comments:
I've always thought that the GPL was very restrictive and non-free in the true sense, which is very ironic considering that loudest proponents of it seem to use the freedom angle as it's greatest virtue. I'm curious by the "right wing" description, because IMO it's more of a socialist/communist ideal, whereas what I would consider truly free(public domain) to be more right wing, and anarchistic.
--Irritant
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