Once again, I must thank everyone for their generous support. It’s meant so much to me to receive your good wishes after giving up on something that meant so much to me.
It would be very gauche for me to sign my own praises. Nonetheless, I feel I must start by posting a selection of people’s feedback about my work - some of it sent to me, some of it said about me that I noticed.
I played with it for a while and I can’t break it! Flawless work as always. This is exactly the module I’ve wanted for a while. Amazing work, Aria.
Your modules are the best-looking and best-documented, as well as some of the most interesting and uniquely useful, so this is a real drag. I consider you to be the most exciting (now former) developer on the platform. Sorry people can’t afford you common respect
Like honestly there isn’t another collection that I downloaded and loaded up in Rack that caused me to say “Holy shit this is brilliant” like I did when I saw ARCANE
[Translated from French] It’s not just your modules but also your patching style in your videos that taught me to stop paying so much attention to the intended purpose of signals and trying to always be deliberate and in full mental control.
It’s hard to believe that you’re new to VCV Rack. Again, I’m excited to see what you come up with next.
This reminded me how much I enjoy your wit, humor, & perspective. I’m very glad you’re a part of this community. Just wanted to let you know.
[Arcane is] def one of the most creative ideas i’ve seen in a while.
also, if darius was hardware i’d buy it immediately
[…] your stuff is super rad - i still wanna build a thing around the series some day - and i am very much looking forward to whatever cool shit you make next
[…] plz make hardware <3
You are such a great addition to the community here. I always enjoy reading your posts. Even when they aren’t about my stuff
i basically got into rack synth and vcv because of aria’s modules which are an amazing meeting between the spiritual and the digital. check out her website its so cool
This is so good. I think this has every feature I’ve ever wanted plus another 10 more I didn’t know I wanted! […] I’m more than willing to pay for modules of this quality on the library - but I donated using your link.
I’m sorry to hear about your decision to stop developing your modules. They are a great example of a unique and beautiful design, and of learning and applying a wide range of new technologies in quite a short time.
As gauche as the move might be, it’s important to make it very clear that I have earned respect, as a peer, in this community. It’s also good that male-identifying developers discussed their own issues in this thread.
It’s important for me that onlookers have the social proof that I have accrued a deserved positive reputation, so they can’t pattern match this affair as an entryist trans person trying to cause trouble in FOSS for personal benefit.
This social proof of my worth was also for my own sake: I had to fight off impostor syndrome the whole time I participated in the community. It was important to remind myself what I did had worth to cope with being treated like a nuisance by VCV. All this feedback was crucial to keep me going at this newly discovered synth-making hobby.
But the proof I am asked to provide, the proof I felt treated like an easily replaced nuisance the whole time, that proof is not forthcoming. Submitting evidence to be judged by a party you have a grief with is a waste of effort. The fact you’ve squandered my willingness to continue providing value to your platform, thought you would get away with it, and that some developers who witnessed the incident left in reaction to it, that should be more than sufficient a proof.
Maybe you think of me as lacking your skills, and thus an acceptable loss.
And sure, I don’t know DSP at all. Out of my 22 modules, 14 of which are unique if we ignore variants sharing code and the blank plate, none create audio signals. As I said, I had to fight off impostor syndrome at all times.
But you better believe that users do not deem me an impostor.
You better believe fellow developers never treated me as an inferior.
Inspiring workflow, musicality, digitally native UI putting live play without menu diving at the forefront, engaging beginner-friendly documentation: this is what I had to offer, and people were starting to get it.
Anyone who paid attention to my trajectory could see I was working my way up to more and more challenging problems. Starting from a simple small-form clone of an existing module, up to my latest release, exposing to the user almost 400 UI elements, in a simple layout they can learn how to make musical in less than 5 minutes.
I have no doubt I could learn this domain, were I inclined, but audio signals simply weren’t my immediate focus of interest, the way generative & semi-aleatoric sequencing was.
The value of VCV Rack entirely lies in its ecosystem of plugins, most of which are open-source. Goodwill from third-party developers is what makes the difference between success and failure. Wasn’t the biggest initial draw of VCV Rack that it offered most of Mutable Instruments?
I’ve never had a chance to be introduced to Émilie, the creator of those modules, but from seeing her participate online in various places, she strikes me as a nice person: when we get the chance to have a conversation, I have no doubt I would not have to prove myself deserving of being talked to as a peer. A much less dedicated or accomplished one, sure, but one nonetheless.
There’s makers of eurorack hardware, of real hardware of metal and diodes, that produce real oscillations at real audio rates sold for real money, the real deal unlike my embarrassing little C++ hacks, who already converse with me as a peer. Those creators, were you to approach them about porting their stuff to VCV, would start by thinking, “Gotta check with Aria first if the VCV guy changed since that time when she got depressed over stopping her softsynths”. Sure, they’re not big-time brands, but what’s the big-time threshold, at a scale of a tiny scene where even the most prestigious hardware brand in your library is a one woman operation?
Let me say more about goodwill.
What gave me the initial spark of goodwill to develop for VCV? The GPL. Your sending the costly signal that governance problems can be routed around if we don’t manage to fix them.
Before trying out VCV, I tried out Voltage Modular. You’ve seen their “Getting started” page for developers? It tells me that to have the privilege of distributing betas to people, I gotta first drop $100. The absurd audacity!
Just like that, they have guaranteed that I will never develop for them. Even if they were to waive the fee in the future. It’s very easy to lose goodwill, or to never earn it in the first place.
Ever heard of one Vitaly, who develops software of iOS and Mac OS, software we are not allowed to name due to an interpersonal conflict that has nothing to do with us?
When he approached me about developing on his platform, he made no mistake who was doing whom a favor by providing modules for his ecosystem. If he open-sources his code again and gets it to work on PC, I’d take the offer, I dunno if that’s on his agenda. It’s not difficult to earn goodwill either! A friendly mail was all it took.
Remember VeeSeeVSTRack? When asked about plans to port it to V1, the developer bsp2 said:
Andrew (the VCV developer) kindly asked me not to do that (and I agreed)
Do you still have enough goodwill to “kindly ask” people not to compete against your income streams?
Well, one thing is sure: you wouldn’t have the goodwill to ask me that today. You’re not my friend, you’re the representative of company that is gleeful about its prospects of screwing me over so long as it’s done in a lawyer-friendly way, talking of the company you respresent in a farcial royal we any chance you get.
It’s no surprise that in this thread, it’s only people like Lars, who do not develop modules, who choose to interpret my motivations from the flawed premise that I care at all about the VCV “project” or “community”. VCV ain’t a project, it’s a company. It isn’t an old-school GNU-style free software project with a BDFL making tough choices for the greater good, it’s a company with a Jobs link on its footer, a proprietary app store, no public dev branch, no outside contributors, an announced release held back for a year for commercial reasons, an upcoming proprietary toll gate monetizing our labor for professional users (that is, the VST version), and a representative with a gross sense of entitlement to our unpaid labor trying to “take it or leave it” his way out of addressing the concerns of the very people who might make it possible for him to eventually earn actual grown-up money from the DIY synth hobby.
My motivations are super simple: make cool art, cool friends, cool toys, cool collabs, cool live shows, and see cool stuff made with my cool stuff (I am eager to see my code forked to explore a different territory, I only ask them to use their own logo).
The motivations I do not have are: make money, make the VCV company money, make it easy for VCV to monetize my unpaid labor, make it easy for the VCV project to prevent forks.
I’m just indifferent by default to people earning money with my work, so long as it doesn’t conflict with my goals. If you manage to earn money from music using my modules, that rules, good for you, send me your bandcamp URL while you’re at it.
Let’s talk about the cool friends motivation: did you know I made friends who use VCV? None of them within the community spaces, mind. The community spaces is mostly male electrical engineers in their 50’s. Fine people, sure, but not my crowd. The forum is utilitarian, stuffy, bogged down in rules where “don’t be a jerk” would have sufficed, and inconducive to light conversation. Were it a physical space, people posting their music would be asked to turn down the volume.
I got to know more people in my inbox after posting this thread than in an entire year in this community.
Let’s also talk more about the “live shows” motivation. Do you know that I used to perform with a graphics tablet, similar to a Cintiq? Do you know it works TERRIBLY with VCV? Do you know that you have announced a year ago a feature that would solve my problem entirely? Do you know that the feature is literally just a few constants to expose as a user preference? Do you know that I use my own code fork to have access to this crucial feature that makes or breaks the feasibility of my performance technique? Do you realize that having experimental unsupported features small subsets of users really need is how forks gain enough traction to displace the original implementation? Do you even know what feature I’m referring to? Or is that just yet another annoying user who needs to stop whining, wasting your precious time, and use the github issues?
Let’s talk more about the money motivation. How much a plugin on the library even sells? As far as I can tell, as of now, a realistic number to expect for a quality offering is no more than 500 sales. That’s side-income, it’s never gonna be commensurate to the market value of the effort expended. You can’t cut anyone a real grown-up engineer paycheck. Focus first on being able to write a decent paycheck for yourself before acting like we’re eager to become your employees, and willing to act around you with the concomitant subordination.
Let’s talk about the “preventing forks” motivation: flat out, you’re the only person who benefits. As I said: I technically use a code fork already, and I benefit from doing that. I’m very eager to resume my collection on a fork that is led by a friendly person instead, and if that fork introduces features incompatible with VCV, I’d make use of them without any hesitation.
Two things make VCV difficult to fork: the trademark, and the library.
But neither is a serious obstacle. The trademarked content is mostly comprised SVG files in a very minimalistic style: those are trivial to remake in such a different style no “trade dress” argument can stick. A competitor has already done that. My own module collection has already removed all dependencies on non-free components.
And the library? 80% of the best stuff in it is already open-source, so there’s that. Commercial releases simply aren’t necessary for the health of a fork. And a more inclusive community would attract more diverse developers, so there would be an even wider offer, with more outsiders like me treating the instrument as a blank slate. And anyway, there’s technical methods to honor the letter but not the spirit of the license, if people want to sell commercial modules without paying you a tithe.
You can add more obstacles to forking in V2, but every obstacle you add entails a goodwill cost. People aren’t stupid, they can parse your legal game plan easily.
Chasing us out of your spaces does not make us go away and disperse. It makes us re-organize in social spaces you not part of. Remaining silent and waiting for people to forget about this issue does not make our own mail threads go silent.
I don’t have your math knowledge, but you bet I can code a plugin library web app, write documentation you’d never guess was in the author’s second language, do visual design in a more mainstream style than my modules, do solid UI code, etc. Whom have you pissed off enough they will contribute more of the necessary skills?
I was going, to prove my good faith in trying to explain the problem, to write a list of things that could be done to start rectifying the situation, but once again, I feel self-conscious about making recommendations about interpersonal communication as one of the few female-identifying people here. That’s despite the fact - it must be mentioned - that this community has consistently treated my gender identity as an absolute non-issue, with not a single incident of bigotry to mention.
So I will only focus on the best recommendation I can come up with: if asking me what the problem is was actually sincere, rather than a calculated rhetorical move to make me look unreasonable, it means you have no idea whom you have pissed off, nor why, and lots of people around you are ticking bombs you still have a chance to defuse.
Like me, they probably think it’s pointless to bring up their grievances until they are at their breaking point, or until a specific incident serves as a catalyst. This situation will recur with someone else if you carry on as before.
A good way to understand the problem would be to solicit anonymous feedback. I saw people use this site for this purpose a while ago, but there’s more good options: https://admonymous.co/
It will be unpleasant to read: had you attempted to treat me this way to my face, my reaction would have been a brutal life lesson about respect, rather than a slow, even-worded, professional reply regulated by a one-sided “code of conduct”. But people will probably also tell you the solutions.