this is a quote from Cockos inc software developers (Reaper, etc). though jj is not related to Cockos, the jj os development follows some of the key ideals here:
http://www.cockos.com/
The engineers who founded Cockos were tired by the frustration and oppression of working within large companies. Large public companies often find themselves slaves to their shareholders and while focusing on money, lose sight of what's really important.
Some rules we try to follow:
Give new features to customers quickly: the paradigm of batching updates and then selling them is both a terrible experience for the customer, and detrimental to the quality of the software.
Avoid copy-protection and DRM schemes: these schemes are almost always ineffective, and usually result in a poorer experience for paying customers than for pirates.
Price software reasonably, trust your customers
Resources should be spent on product development whenever possible. To the consumer, this translates to more bang for the buck.
never complain about a plethora of updates. to have the user community test the product and have the programmer respond directly to their reports is the greatest solution to the beta testing problem that i've yet encountered. progress moves fast. this is one of the reasons that Reaper is so popular - bugs are splattered and features are added at a rapid pace.
look at other companies - would you rather encounter a bug, report it, and update a week later, or find a bug, report it, and wait til the company introduces the next version of the software 1 year+ later? this is why the akai software suffers so horribly - there is no consumer-programmer interaction.
