Continuing the discussion from Rules for Plugins & Modules category:
I don’t quite understand the rules here. It’s ok to say bad things about plugins that cost more that $0.00, but it’s not ok if they do cost $0.00? I guess that the Surge plugins aren’t top notch because they are free?
It doesn’t read like that to me. It sounds like for free plugins you may have to accept them in the state they are in (no obligation for devs to fix bugs) but there is an obligation for paid plugins to work as advertised so if this is not the case then it can be discussed as long as it is constructive and not harassment.
you paid for it and the developer is obligated to provide a working plugin in exchange for a payment.
I paid for VCV Pro and it hasn’t worked in my daw for a year but apparently they are not obligated to provide a working vst in exchange for my payment.
I reported bugs in premium VCV modules weeks ago that I could fix myself in an hour had I access to the source code.
Commercial software support is an extreme challenge. I have worked on a commercial 3D modelling tool suite for which we literally had 1000+ bugs reported. Our first order of support was to try to provide the customer with a work-around, if it was truly a bug (or clear up confusion if it was confusion and not a bug), but true bugs took time to resolve and sometimes spanned multiple releases.
In general, we developers were responsible for support of the code we were responsible for developing. Part of the bug reporting and tracking software capability was to assign an owner to each bug and categorize the bug in several ways such that triage was possible. Feature requests were tracked totally separately from bugs.
We gave the customer an “issue number” so that the customer could see where their bugs and requests stood.
There is a lot of room for improvement here. There are well established tools for managing this and communicating with the customers.
It is also interesting to look at various open source license terms and statements. Almost all say that there is no guarantee of functionality.
But, I think it is a good “rule” that no one harasses anyone. Everyone should be civil, courteous and respectful towards each other. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with each other.
So that statement (forum rules) seems to be a “terms and conditions” for the plugin library. One should expect commercial plugins to work, and there is some implied rule that they do. Whereas free plugins are not expected to work.
I think that’s what it’s saying. I looked around a bit and didn’t run into any actual statement of terms and conditions, other than this rather obscure document.
The VCV EULA makes not distinction between commercial and free plugins, as far as I can tell.
Certainly possible I’m misreading the rules. But clearly it’s trying to make some distinction between free and commercial plugins.
emphatically support
Sure, it’s a good rule. But it’s already an overarching rule stated very well here: VCV - Community Rules.
The irony here, of course, is that your example of “its ok to say bad things bout commercial plugins but not free ones” is you are saying something bad about free ones. (Although I understand it is a rhetorical technique, obviously, it made me chuckle).
I also read that document as “be constructive, don’t be rude about other peoples work, and no-one is expected to fix bugs or add features in their software for you if you didn’t pay for it”.
With Surge: I’ve sometimes stated this as the “100% unconditional refund to anyone for surge” guarantee. An easy promise for us to make. (With the BaconMusic plugs I’m a bit more direct - they kinda stink and are mostly my experimental playground so you know, don’t use em?)
But I’ll also add, from having been here at the start then having sort of drifted away and recently come back, that the quality of the feedback we got on the surge modules in this forum has been great, including people identifying really critical bugs we had missed in our pre-beta. I think things work pretty well by and large. So whether there is a rule or not, or whether your reading diverges from mine, people seem to be acting in a way consistent with my reading of that rule on this forum, if that helps?
Yes, it was intended to be totally rhetorical. I picked Surge as an example of a free plugin that is as good as any paid one. Excellent support, great sound, light on CPU. I guess I could have picked Bogaudio to use as an example of a plugin that is as good as or better than any commercial one. But it was your lucky day!
Anyway, it’s pretty well know that I don’t agree that we should encourage inferior plugins in the library just because they are free etc… I don’t see how it adds value for a user to have no way to know the plugin they are investing time in is known to be not great. It’s good a good selling point for VCV (thousands of free modules), and I guess it’s good for some developers?
In fact my own plugins (free, of course) had as their main “selling point” quality. But quality is a difficult thing to differentiate on, and it doesn’t help that discussing quality of other modules seems to be discouraged. However, that minor dilemma was easily solved.
Somehow this quote comes to mind.
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Darlington, Act 1.
@Olival_Clanaro wrote that comment while he was a moderator.
The official forum rules are at VCV - Community Rules.