Music/recording has been an unusually competitive software market for some time now. Unlike, say, the situation with Photoshop, one can name dozens of products that have been releasing updates regularly for decades on end, because of exactly this kind of lock-in and a seemingly unending need for more features, more sounds and effects (and higher quality ones) and more hardware support.
Trying to get into the commercial software packages as an amateur, one gets this sinking feeling of, "oh my god, there's too much stuff to maintain." Installers for every little plugin you come across, some of them using dongles, others using serials, some a tiny sub-megabyte download, others being dozens of gigabytes in samples or loops. And then you have to think about the handy presets and effects chains, hardware setups for different situations...and then a learning curve for everything, even in mostly-similar situations. It essentially becomes impossible to restore a project from an earlier setup, other than to salvage raw audio and MIDI.
I can see why a lot of people still put their stock in hardware even today; the product cycles are longer and the hardware isn't going to "disappear into the ether" so easily.
However, I also think that open source is going to gradually gain an advantage here because, once developed, it can remain stable, well-integrated, and easy to install in ways that the commercial packages can't. It hasn't hit the point where you can adequately point to equivalents for all studio functions, and it probably won't do so for some years to come, because of the extremely slow development of UI polish, new features in existing software, and API standardization. The Linux audio distributions today are still embarrassingly cumbersome to work with. But it's possible to envision a day where it all works together and has some form of healthy relationship with the commercial market.
Trying to get into the commercial software packages as an amateur, one gets this sinking feeling of, "oh my god, there's too much stuff to maintain." Installers for every little plugin you come across, some of them using dongles, others using serials, some a tiny sub-megabyte download, others being dozens of gigabytes in samples or loops. And then you have to think about the handy presets and effects chains, hardware setups for different situations...and then a learning curve for everything, even in mostly-similar situations. It essentially becomes impossible to restore a project from an earlier setup, other than to salvage raw audio and MIDI.
I can see why a lot of people still put their stock in hardware even today; the product cycles are longer and the hardware isn't going to "disappear into the ether" so easily.
However, I also think that open source is going to gradually gain an advantage here because, once developed, it can remain stable, well-integrated, and easy to install in ways that the commercial packages can't. It hasn't hit the point where you can adequately point to equivalents for all studio functions, and it probably won't do so for some years to come, because of the extremely slow development of UI polish, new features in existing software, and API standardization. The Linux audio distributions today are still embarrassingly cumbersome to work with. But it's possible to envision a day where it all works together and has some form of healthy relationship with the commercial market.