That's not freely, but free of charge. Very different!francoisphils wrote: ↑Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:56 pm You may use Reaper freely as long as you like , it depends on your honesty , for me Reaper wins by far!
I don't have a problem with REAPER. They are just trying to make a living and for some reason selling proprietary binaries is considered more profitable than selling binaries compiled from FLOSS code. What I don't understand is why they don't release it under a copyleft license, since they basically already give it free of charge. They could keep the trademark to avoid bad forks, like Ardour does. Yes, it would probably get in distros but that could only help its adoption. And if they really are annoyed by it, they could use the trademark to prevent distros from calling the program REAPER, like Vital does.
In other words: REAPER is distributed DRM-free. If the trial expires, they don't enforce it in any way, so users can use it endlessly for free, without any limits on functionalities or watermarking that I know of. So most people who pay for REAPER, pay for it out of moral duty. Would this moral duty change if REAPER were to be released under the GPLv3? Absolutely not - or better, yes but only in a legalistic sense: if you keep using REAPER after expiration, you are technically a pirate (or are you, since the program allowed you to use it?). So why use a business model which does not offer any advantages over the one used by Ardour but keep the sources proprietary? I do not understand it.