I suspect that e.g. the Internet is partly built with open source and thus e.g. works reliably.
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One thing that came to mind while filling the latest survey. There could be more options to plug-ins monetisation besides closed-source/commercial plugins. It is not because it is free that it has to be provided only for free.
For example, one way to do this would be to develop “plugin bundles”, containing a good set of (open source) plugins, with extra effort put on UI, UX, documentation, presets, and an homogeneous theme. On the store, these bundles would not be free, although likely not expensive (to give an incentive to pay for the extra effort). A user could still access the plugins for free via the mod-plugin-builder, this way this does not break the spirit of open source.
What the user would pay is then the additional service of the packaging+UI/UX improvement+presets, ease of access via plugin store, and the knowledge that these plugins are well polished and match the experience of the MOD dwarf. Then, they’ll also have the knowledge that they support the company, and allow the development of more features/more plugins.
Additionally, these curated plugin bundles could be combined with a concept of curated pedalboard bundles for maximum experience 
Just an idea…
I think at the moment, the feeling with all these plugins that come by default is that (1) there are too many at start, so it is not easy to understand which ones are for me or fulfil my expectations (2) I have no idea if it’s just there because it’s free (and thus it didn’t cost MOD anything to include it), or whether it received a lot of attention from the company to match the expectations of the device.
As a linux user, I am able to build plugins myself from the github, but I wouldn’t mind to pay for them if I know they have received that extra care and are more likely to suit my needs.
One thing that might be required then is a better way to categorise plugins, like user categories, and “bundle categories”, and a better way to browse the plugins/plugin categories compared to now.
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This more or less sums it all.
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@gianfranco I answered to the survey… But… I’m in tier 3 so still waiting for the device. Hope the survey is valid!
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Just a small commentary about this theme.
Sentry relicensed their code by the following way: a company that isn’t Sentry can only use the source code to offer a SaaS service if the release have at least 1.5 years old. As they say:
- Anyone should be able to run Sentry for themselves or their business
- No difference between our cloud service and our open-source product (no open-core model)
- Minimal limitations on usage of code; as free as possible
- Protection from other companies selling our work
Check out this blog post for more details
I don’t know if something like this can be valid to MOD. My feeling is that zynthian and pisound code are with a lack of sync with Mod more than 1.5 years and it was sufficient to harm the company.
But, I prefer this compared with the other ideia (code developed is only opened after 1 year).
But if the closed idea is more interesting for the company, to me, make sense that open source contribution would benefit all community (i.e. this code is aways open source / will not be closed for one year), just like GitLab does.
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Ok……
So, posting here because I’m kind of disgusted. I love what you do. I own Mod products, and have built fork products for personal use. I was broken up about what happened until I read this post, and now I’m sitting here and am just kind of shocked.
Customers, you are either being lied to, or the people at Mod have no self awareness. They blame open source projects for their demise, but the fact is that it was no industry secret that they were never great businessmen. I’ve had numerous conversations over the years with companies they have spoken to asking for investment, shops they asked to carry product, etc, and the overwhelming consensus was “we love the idea and the product but there is no plan, no logistics, no support”. So now they are sitting here and blaming the open source community for their own failings. They are blaming companies that are smaller outfits, ones who sell kits and have less features. Ones that are appealing to the most niche audience, and if anything act as advertisements for the real thing. They are blaming the companies that support them because they can’t reflect on what they did wrong, and asking you to foot the bill.
Now, before you go and accuse me of not understanding, I work in product development. I’ve been both in product management and engineering. I know how the bread is made. These guys have asked my friends for money. When someone asks for investment, they need to actually show how the investment will be recouped. If you have not made money so far you have to show how your strategy is changing. If you can’t do that, then that is on you.
Now, don’t feel sorry for the big money investors. They invest in startups expecting that half will fold. If there are small investors then that is different, but but the big guys? Yea…. On the other hand, don’t let Mod weaponize sympathy in an effort to crowdfund another go when they can’t even reflect on what they should have done differently.
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I feel that you’ve completely misread this topic.
When investors pull out several times with a clear message that they feel opensource is a liability, that is a clear message from that side no?
This topic is to discuss this conflict because the MOD team really supports the opensource ethos, but finding investors for your business apparently gets blocked by that same ethos. This is worth discussing.
There is no “blame” put here, it’s just facts. Investors are afraid to step into a business that keeps its core open like this. You didn’t touch on any of the issues raised, but just blame the MOD team for not doing their job … however one of their jobs was to attract investors so they could grow the company.
Either discuss the topic or stay out of it.
[considering that you registered just to make this post is telling and shows that you are not at all interested in what’s actually being asked here]
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I will respectfully disagree with you here, @dreamer.
@KenUston might be away from the focus of this thread, but he has 2 very valid points which, in the end, converge to the very reason this topic exists: MOD’s failure to thrive as a business.
a) MOD seems to have never been a sustainable company, long before the pandemic and the troubles with sourcing parts. Search the forum and you’ll see a multitude of employees, CEOs, and fundraising efforts throughout its existence. Furthermore, they expanded their product line (also via fundraising) and did not deliver on one of them – the expression pedal – but from reading the posts there is always some external factor or culprit. This points to a higher trend, easily verifiable here in the forum, of not shouldering responsibilities professionally. Which brings us to B;
b) There has indeed been some finger pointing at the ethos of the open source community for using MOD’s code without asking first. The so called “etiquette” or walking up to the developer and asking to use it, albeit laudable and generally a good practice, is not bound by law if you publish your software under GPL and similar licenses. So the failure to point investors to the fact that MOD is a self-contained and superior product with a robust user base and good reputation falls entirely in MOD’s shoulders again. You cannot put a product in the market at 750 Euro and not supply a decent instructions manual to begin with. As far as documentation goes, MOD is not better than Pisound or Zynthian. And it’s a lot worse than Beebo and Zoia.
Therefore, in a thread where the conflict “between Open Source and Business” is being discussed, now on its hundredeth+ thread, pointing to the business side of the equation is not wrong or uncalled for. Whereas @KenUston doesn’t provide any insights as to how to solve the problem (which btw not all posters did either), he is correct in some of his assertions
And I must confess I agree with the portion related to lack of self-awareness entirely. They do not seem to have a good grip on the business, marketing and logistics side of things. I applied for the sponsirong effort of reboot v1 and was never even sent the application form, which I only got from another user. To my bad surprise, there was noting in it that gave an investor the slightest hope that there would be significant changes made in the structure of the business. No wonder investment fell instead of grow during that period prior to 1 Sep 2022.
I understand your stance on open source @dreamer and respect it. I am a supporter and believer too. And also an user, knowingly or not. But the “conflict between open source and business” is not simply tilted to the OSS side – even if I completely agree (also from experience) that it rubs investors the wrong way. There is a component of business expertise in marketing their products and even the benefit of the core system being open that was not properly explored. Citing the “community” development as a strength most times only strengthens the belief that management is too hippie to be taken seriously. There is a clear business case to be made – even if ModOS remains fully open – because the physical product and its ecosystem are on a league or their own. A strong pitch in that direction clearly lacked for Mod Devices. And they don’t seem amicable towards criticism in that direction. (This is the first time I openly manifest these opinions here, btw.)
Therefore, with all due respect, his comments are valid in this thread.
Furthermore, many of us (yourself included) have contributed ideas, either in favour or against it, but from the latest push for Mod’s reboot, it seems like they are willing to do things exactly as before, and still no mea culpa anywhere to be seen.
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I’m quoting this to back my point. Now, it’s easy to blame the other guys for your problems, but again, the competition is literally selling kits. DIY. Pedals that sell what, a few here and there? Hell, Blokas literally lets you use almost any other audio interface aside from theirs, and is many versions behind in terms of support. The people buying aren’t lost customers, they are geeks (myself included) who either wanted something that they could make into a project, or would use what they built as a gateway drug.
In terms of the “same pedal interface”, what Mod has done isn’t novel. If we want to split hairs, you could buy yourself an Open Stomp Coyote-1 in 2009. Line 6 literally sold an dev kit that allowed you to make your own pedal. Open source pedals aren’t new. Complaining about someone copying your idea is just being petty when you weren’t even anywhere near the first on the block.
Most of the plugins included have been around for years. The Mod platform is a host for open source plugins included in Ubuntu Studio since the early 2010’s. They talk about investing over a million dollars into the software stack, but the included software plugins have been around forever. Mod made a convenient and stable computer to run them, but to now act like they did all the work and everyone is now ruining the business is just absurd, as Mod was built on the work of thousands of dedicated open source developers.
I’m mad because it is blaming others for the lack of support Mod customers will get. The unfulfilled Mod orders? Blame Blokas! The warranty that is now no good? Blame Zynthian! Don’t ask yourself how they could burn through the VC money. Don’t ask yourself why they didn’t ship you your expression pedal. Just blame everyone else.
As far as me registering for this post, I’ve been registered for a lot longer under a different name. I just don’t want to be dragged into even further drama.
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Also @dreamer, in addition to the above, again you have bought into what you have been told. The investors weren’t scared of open source. They were scared by the fact that the books didn’t look good and there was no plan on how to turn things around. The idea of “you give us more money and then we will get more time and then….magic!!!” is not a business plan. As far as distribution not taking on products, you can find a distributor for anything. Literally anything. Distribution wants their cut however. If you can’t offer the kind of margin that allows someone to sell your product and make back their money, again, that is on Mod, not tiny operations selling DIY kits or cut down boxes on Tindie.
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Ah you talked to all of the investors yourself? a special secret insight from the other side?
Interesting 
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I’m friends with people who they have asked for investment in some cases, business partnerships in others. I’m giving you the reasons why they walked.
Here, going to give you some perspective. The first Mod sold 200 units. That is the direct number, from Mod. They had no competition at the time. They had no solid plans on how things were going to be different in the future.
But part of this topic is about the reason why other investors walked. Apparently it is a worry to some of them that MOD software is opensource and other companies can make “knock-offs” based on it. The perception for those investors is that the opensource nature of the MOD stack is a liability and for them that is a reason to not invest. Now that may not be a concern to you and your friends, but for MOD that is something to at least think about and discuss.
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@dreamer um……I think you are kind of missing the point. I’m telling you that people who were hit up for money or partnerships walked before putting in a dime. You know, what Mod is complaining about in the subject of this email. I don’t know every investor they hit up, but the ones I know walked not because of the open source options, not because there were kits, but because there was no business plan to get new customers or grow the business.
Listen, open source is awesome. Open source companies can make money. When a company doesn’t have a plan however, why should they be invested in? When they have burned through investment and have no plan, people want to know what is going to be different?
If anyone did say that the open source thing was an issue, I don’t know, maybe it’s that they are expecting you to use X42, Guitarix and Sooperlooper? You know, the plugins that are free as part of KXstudio? The repo that Mod has forked a massive amount of their work from? I can almost buy that. I didn’t hear it from the people I know but I can buy it. Having created a pedal front end, a hardware pedal and a storefront, they had enough differentiating factors that the ball was in their court. Given how notoriously non-WYSIWYG adverse most guitarists are, having a plug and play pedal with a store front is literally the core differentiator that anyone can understand. Please tell me how ANY investor would look at kits that require you to learn how to build from source for new plugins, or build a kit would consider the other guys as competition. They wouldn’t, and you are now buying into the lie so you don’t complain that you no longer have any support for your purchase.
Well that’s the whole point here. You are pretending that you do know. Thank you for admitting that you in fact only know a single point of view from the investment story (not saying it’s not a valuable insight, just that it’s completely irrelevant for this topic).
I can very much understand how an investor, that doesn’t have much technical insight, would look at 3rd party companies taking the potential results of your investments (unique software developed), create their own products based on it and you not seeing a single dime in return and then consider that this is not worth investing in to.
Your argument is “well if only you had a super investment-plan, then these investors would stick around”. For some that is the case perhaps, but for others they really consider this a liability and waste of their investment. I personally don’t agree with any of that, but I do understand that point of view. Seeing others reap the benefits of your investment without you getting anything in return (one could argue that “exposure” is some return, but look at how that concept is destroying the music industry already) also doesn’t inspire confidence for those just looking at the face value of such opensource developments. The core being opensource is part of the business plan in a sense, and not all investors think that is viable.
My personal opinion here is that the opensource nature, and subsequent third party implementations of the core, is actually an opportunity. It means that the potential market for the plugin store and other features organically expands beyond just the physical products created at MOD. This could actually create new software channels through which other revenue streams could be tapped.
So imo that should be part of the business plan, to incorporate these third party products into the ecosystem more. And perhaps that would sway those scared investors into seeing the potential, instead of any liability.
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Try 3 investors and two stores….decent data set. These are companies that should have been layups. A bad pitch is a bad pitch. Are you telling me that they suddenly turned around their pitch last minute, having basically used the same pitch for years?
Ok, so @dreamer please, tell me, what do you do for a living? Are you in product development? Engineering? Have you ever released a product? You can go to stores now and buy 6 products I’ve worked on in the last 3 years, right now, with contributions to open source on GitHub. Open source has never been a liability for any of our products. No distibutor has ever said that “oh, you have a lot of open source code and are running Linux, nope.”Have you actually worked in cradle to grave product life cycle management? Please, tell me, how much do you actually know about what it takes to get a product out. I can tell you this because this is my job. I can tell you why each failure I’ve worked on failed, and I’ve learned to actually take ownership for my mistakes.
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There are very interesting points raised in the comments above, the discussion is very interesting.
I knew MOD for quite some time being a Linux user (and audio user) myself for years.
One of the main reason that convinced me to buy the Dwarf, beside the tech aspect and the great idea behind, was indeed the Free software aspect and the community vibe which led to concept like pedalboard sharing, forum support and so on.
Frankly, the philosophical aspect played a huge role, i am not sure if i would have spent more than £400 for a guitar pedal ever.
This is also one of the reason why I am still here and i even pledged some money into this cause.
I hope the Mod Team don’t give up on Free software and insist with pursuing the open approach.
I know Linuxaudio is still catching up and it’s not attractive like the server side of things where linux is a goldmine. I also do understand the production of physical hardware introduces even more challenges and dependencies compared to the only software development realm.
However thanks to the effort of projects like MOD or Ardour for example I believe a success with open source audio it’s still possible.
My really 2 cents here…
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Speaking of Ardour, maybe one (additional) point forward for the MOD team would be to open up the plugin store for LV2 plugins built for amd64 devices as well, just as a central place for the Linux audio community to provide a store for commercial plugins. This might attract more developers because the target audience is not limited to the small crowd of Duo/Dwarf owners, but to all Linux users.
While this might add some development overhead, this might still be a small extension and AFAIK there is currently no other (commercial) LV2 plugin portal, so the MOD plugin store might evolve to that central place.
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