As for the "geek" thing, when you think a "normal" person is going to try to understand Lemur programming I think you make a big mistake.(I just declared myself "geek" just for trying I think ) For most people this is simply unthinkabe because of the complexity (I know everybody who understands Lemur or midi or osc does not feel this way, but let me ashure you for a beginner it is a huge mountain to "take", an enormous learning curve,this is what my non-geek friends keep telling me..). So when people offer "out of the box solutions " that will work for others, this will contribute to the spreading of Lemur in a great way. If I was running Lemur I would promote and support all great solutions, paid or unpaid no difference, and be proud.
This is what I have run into time and time again. My friends and contacts who are interested in scripting and midi cannot afford an iPad and the software. My friends who can afford an iPad, and find Lemurs potential interesting, are entirely intimidated by the scope of work involved. It is cake for us, no doubt. I'm a web developer who jumped the gap pretty easily. We've got a couple talented people for whom Lemur is their first language. If your mind is highly logic oriented, as in a heavy left brain kind of person, this is practically like inhaling and exhaling, but a lot of musicians are right brained... And that is the role I see robust, pre packaged templates playing.
What you guys are in effect doing, is beginning to chase off some very talented people. Look at sequencomat, the various releases up to the current one, the time involved, the marketing put forth. That thing is outright amazing, and to belittle him for expecting compensation is ridiculous. I don't see where anyone us are refusing to contribute to the community, we're just not supplying the kingdom. Would you rather these templates not get released at all, potentially missing out on the inspiration and new approaches to manipulating the platform that they provide? Do you honestly not want people like that around, however in frequent their advice may be?
Do you think everyone on stack overflow releases all of their software for free on those forums?
Hell no, but they still have a great community. I learned PHP, MySQL, and a good portion of CSS from that site and
I've never had an account. Their community is so solid that damn near every question I've had has been asked, answered and recorded. At worst I have to abstract and combine 3 or 4 answers. Peoples bits of code get reused and re sold all the time, but if that bit gets too big, some compensation is generally in order.
We all agree, there is an etiquette to it: don't steal, and I think this is a two way street. If someone is selling a template and you make a free clone, don't expect them to contribute to that project, or even be surprised when they incorporated some of your ideas into their version. This isn't me making a threat or accusation anywhere, just an extrapolation based on brief observations.
And to say that Live Control 2 is free is the say as saying Mail in OSX is free. It is free for the user but somebody gets paid for doing it.
How about the fact that it *was* for touchOSC, whence it magically moved to a more expensive platform, and at the same time, updates to TouchOSC basically stopped. I don't want to insinuate anything, but I DO want to know the details of that story regarding what was coincidence and what wasn't... Either way I think we all look forward to the finished product.
Tell you what, if Lemur was a free app, I would be a bit more hesitant to charge or pay for anything built. I mean, it would have to be through the roof either way (I would have paid $10 to $15 for Live Control on Touch OSC). However it is, as apps stand, on the higher end of prices, and liine uses this community and it's library as a selling point. I'm not going to work my ass off to build something that helps them get paid while I, at best, get a bit of SEO to my site. I will pay my dues to the community, but I'm not laying over the barbed wire just to be recognized as a hero. This isn't bitterness towards Liine either, as far as I can tell they remain neutral on the whole subject and sensibly so. Free stuff is great for their product, but to demand it is bad business sense, so as far as PR goes it is a good subject to avoid. Add to that the free marketing they receive, as I've mentioned in earlier posts. At the same time, its asinine to go up to them and demand they pay you for a template you think is phenomenal. So what is there to do but let the market decide?