A not-so-insignificant number of FOSS developers are well able to make quality UIs, but decide to charge for their more polished creations.
Between having to make a living somehow, and not reaping a whole lot of other personal benefits from open source audio development, it takes a very special kind of person to publish these contributions in the first place. Once they're published, generally with its UI defined in code by a developer person, they're not necessarily easy for a designer to edit.
Nor is there much of a steady community around most of the plugins. So many are "publish, feature-complete enough, move on" kind of projects.
As always, be the change you want to see in the world.
With Zynthian OS up and running, the full list of plugins shows in its webconf page, it's so long that they have to hide basically most of the plugins from the main on-device UI.
Roughly speaking, if it's open source, most likely it will work. If it's proprietary, assume that only Pianoteq and a small number of u-he plugins will work. Most commercial products with binary-only distribution don't feel like RPi devices are a large enough market for them to build binaries for it. Even if they otherwise offer ARM builds for Apple Silicon and Linux builds for x86.
The Steam client has to restart in order to pick up the newly added external titles, at least last time I tried. In gaming mode, restarting the client means restarting the system, which is ever so slightly annoying.
Apart from that though, it works just fine on the Steam Deck.
I just tried it today actually - I just had to exit the steam deck UI mode, enter desktop mode, add them with Heroic, and then restart the deck UI mode from the desktop shortcut and it worked!
It's a little more nuanced than that. Software and gained freedoms survive not because they exist, but because they are being actively maintained. If your original, never-taken-away software does not get continually maintained, then:
* It will slowly go stale, for example, it may not get ported to newer, increasingly expected desktop APIs.
* It will lose users to competing software (such as your proprietary fork) which are better maintained.
As a result, it loses its relevance and utility over time. People that never update their systems can continue using it as they always have, assuming no online-only restrictions or time-limited licenses. But to new use cases and new users, the open software is now less desirable and the proprietary fork accumulates ever more power to screw over people with anti-consumer moves. Regulators ignore the open variant due to its niche marketshare, increasing the likelihood of things going south.
Harm can be done to people who don't have alternatives. In order to have alternatives, you need either a functioning free market or a working, relevant, sufficiently usable product that can be forked if worse comes to worst. Free software can of course help in establishing a free market, it isn't one or the other.
If a proprietary product takes over from one controlled by the community, much of the time it's not a problem. It can be replaced or done without.
If a proprietary platform takes over from one controlled by the community, something that determines not only how you go about your business but what other people expect from you, everyone gets harmed. The problem with a lot of proprietary software is that every company and their dog wants their product to become a platform and reshape the market to discourage alternatives.
MIT by itself does no harm. If it works like LLVM and everyone contributes because it makes more sense than developing a closed-off platform, then great! If it helps to bootstrap a proprietary market leader while the originally useful open original shrivels away into irrelevance, not as great.
No. Jonathan was co-maintaining KDE neon, which now has one developer left and is about to be joined by KDE Linux, another take on a Plasma-based distro. He also handled release manager duties, which have been transferred and running smoothly for a few months now.
He may have contributed in other ways that I'm not aware of, but overall KDE is in a very good spot with many more developers working on stuff.
For others who might not know, KDE Neon is a distribution. I was initially confused because I thought it might have been an alternative desktop environment to KDE Plasma.
This is probably the greatest curse and blessing of modern Linux: there are an impractical number of distributions. I guess you could probably say the same thing for desktop environments, various services, bootloaders, etc.
A big hangup with all of this is, who is "us"? Whom do you owe money to?
The original author? What if I end up forking the software without the original authors involved, am I going to do it for free with all the proceeds going to people who aren't working on it anymore?
Or all future contributors? Using which formula to divvy up that money? Lines of code, useful bug reports written, number of tasks triaged, number of tasks resolved, documentation authored, users supported - what determines the relative amount of your contribution? Who receives the payment(s) from $megacorp, can they be trusted to redistribute it among contributors? What happens when the original maintainer / payment receiver steps back or scales back their contributions? How to avoid the divvy-up metric being gamed by people who care more about the money than the quality of the software?
Yes, it's possible; no, "just add to the license" doesn't cut it. This is a much bigger question. How you answer these questions determines whether your project even preserves open source's main (user-side) benefit of forkability.
Phabricator had its task tracker open to everyone, but the company behind it would charge for prioritization of tasks being tackled. If you want your bug fixed or feature implemented before whatever else is on the maintainer's inherent priority list, pay up. IIRC, they also did all development in-house without accepting merge requests from the outside, but I may misremember.
It's unclear how successful they were with this. Phabricator lasted for about a decade before announcing the end of its development, not all of which was as a stand-alone company. The announcement didn't say why they stopped.
About 4-6% in US and other Western countries, depending on analytics source. Increases in the past year or so by a full percentage point or so. More in India, less in South America, barely any in China.
The increased visibility due to SteamOS/Proton, coverage by various prominent TechTubers, end of Windows 10 support, availability of image-based OS upgrades and Flatpak/Snap to supercede package dependencies, all seem to combine into an actual breakout year comparatively. We'll see if the trend holds or was just a one-off.
Until monopoly, or until 15-20% when companies start offering widespread Linux support for applications and peripheral management, and retail stores start selling some devices with a Linux desktop preloaded?
I'd do the math, but it really depends on whether the recent growth holds, accelerates, or slows down again. So, hard to tell.
I'm almost confident it'll slow down, or regress a little bit, historically that's what happens when it grows and then it'll equalize again around 2-3%.
The moment another or a few new AAA titles with kernel-level anti-cheat come out, people go back to Windows.
Gaming could, and probably will, be the key to the "Year of the Linux desktop" but the anti-cheat problem needs solved.
Between having to make a living somehow, and not reaping a whole lot of other personal benefits from open source audio development, it takes a very special kind of person to publish these contributions in the first place. Once they're published, generally with its UI defined in code by a developer person, they're not necessarily easy for a designer to edit.
Nor is there much of a steady community around most of the plugins. So many are "publish, feature-complete enough, move on" kind of projects.
As always, be the change you want to see in the world.