Ryanmf wrote:To those of you who insist that Bitwig must be Ableton in disguise, I'm sorry, but that's idiotic.
Yeah, I was just trying to think of a way that the companies could be working together in some reasonable (if very unusual) way.
Seems clear to me that bitwig's stuff is written from the ground up. Runs on Linux for cryin' out loud! The look (of the screenshots), well... they do have that main UX guy from Ableton, right? So, yeah. Also, all 'minimal' look UIs are going to be kind of similar. I'm glad bitwig also chose the minimal look. BUT, the look *is* quite different when you examine it closely.
So, agreed. Bitwig studio could not be in any way related to Live 8's code base at least.
Ryanmf wrote:
To anyone who suggests that Bitwig Studio looks too much like live to be anything but a cheap knock-off, I'd love to hear your description of how you would implement a clip matrix without the results of your work resembling Live in any way. Extra points for an explanation of how your arbitrary decision to distance your UI design from Live's represents an improvement in usability.
Yeah, you don't want to make the ARP vs Moog mistake. ARP reportedly designed things just to be different from Moog, and as you might expect... some things they should have said "Ya know, that can't be improved on".
Ryanmf wrote:
pgmjsd wrote:Regarding bitwig being Live 9 - Maybe. I think at least there must be some agreement between the two companies.
This is coming from a 20+ year software engineering veteran, FWIW.
Most software companies (here in the US at least) have non-compete agreements preventing key employees from using proprietary knowledge (which the company paid for them to learn) to build a competing product for specific time period after they leave the company. The only way to really avoid non-compete lawsuits is to wait it out.
Or live in a state like California where non-compete clauses are unenforceable.
I'm aware that some states have that. I'm not sure that it completely prevents lawsuits though. Really large companies, larger than Ableton (like Oracle), can sometimes make life miserable with loads of top notch lawyers... but that's a story for another day.
Ryanmf wrote:
pgmjsd wrote:It seems strange to me that a successful company like Ableton would just let go of key employees like that.
Many of Ableton's development decisions have seemed strange to me, too.
pgmjsd wrote:Maybe the employment laws / practices in Germany are different?
Maybe? In a different country in the labor-friendly EU with a different electorate, a different judiciary, a different history? Yeah, maybe.
Easy there, just asking because I don't know for sure.
Ryanmf wrote:
It turns out that non-compete clauses can only be enforced in Germany for a maximum of two years. Even then the former employer must pay a minimum of half the employee's gross salary for the period. And there may be other stipulations depending on the work agreement, etc.
Yes, the timeframe is also fairly short here (in NYC). However, under the right conditions (like not being burdened by a huge old code base), you can get a lot done in two years.
Ryanmf wrote:
Archive.org scraped pages listing these guys as the developers of Bitwig as far back as March 2009, and we don't have any way of knowing when they left Ableton. In any event, Ableton would have needed to pay these guys not to work to have any hope of enforcing a non-compete clause.
That's been known to happen, but Ableton isn't that big of a company to act like that.
Anyway, thanks for the response.
I was just trying to imagine some realistic way/reason that the two companies could be cooperating. It would have to be a bizarre arrangement, was my point (if there was a point). Mostly idle speculation.
but I think that mistake will not happen again