by vermis_rex » Fri Jun 22, 2007 11:58 pm
While in a perfect world appealing to E-mu would solve everything, in this world it will (almost completely) never happen. I suppose there's a tiny little chance, but I doubt it... and here's why:
E-mu are no longer run by kind hearted, enthusiastically creative people. Now they're owned by Creative Labs, and CL is run by business people. And for business people, it's all about how much it cost them to make. Somebody had to pay for the development time that went into it, so it is an asset of value to the company. Unless somebody is going to pay them that equivalent value (or more, depending on what they buyer is buying it for... if it's going to form the basis of another product, probably quite a bit more... if it's going to form the basis of a competing product, they probably wouldn't sell it at all... ever...)
The Internet has created an atmosphere of openness and free flow of ideas that we get used to thinking of intellectual property as a freely exchangeable thing... but the business people are still living out in the solid world, and for them it's all about the money.
This is why all the ideas tossed around here about getting the EOS into open source will never happen either. The EOS forms the basis for the current Emulator/Proteus X products, so there's no way in hell E-mu is ever going to let the source code out of the building. If the proprietary file system involves elements of the sample/preset/bank structure, then I doubt they'd let that go either.
Our only hope would be to get one or two individuals to approach E-mu with an offer for limited release under license of the specs/code. The license would probably have to be extremely restrictive, and spell out that the spec/code could only be used by those designated individuals, only for purposes of providing non-developmental support for legacy product users (non-developmental = can't add anything new to the code/spec, otherwise it becomes a competing derivative product). And there would probably be signatures and secret handshakes and diabolical pacts and such as well, just to make it really binding on the licensee.
Corporations feel no love for users of their past products, because they would really prefer that you buy their current/new products. Only craftsmen and artists feel for their fans.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but this is just the way things seem to work (well, that and I'm really pessimistic anyway)