If you own a Jazz Bass, you’re pretty much set for life in the bass department.
You see, in the audio world we are used to things that last. Technologically once we achieve something, we don’t change it.
A hundred years ago a company invented the microphone, allowing us to record anything, we pretty much never changed it.
Thirty years ago a company invented MIDI, allowing us to control instruments via data, we pretty much never changed it.
Seventeen years ago a company invented the Virtual Studio Technology format (VST), allowing us to have perfect clones of real world instruments. Guess what? We pretty much never changed it.
The VST format is beautiful: you can download the SDK, can build whatever you want with it, distribute it as you want. If you sell your plugin, you need to pay Steinberg back. It is supported in every single audio app on Windows and others, completely and it happened really fast (we still have issues to create and modify Adobe’s PDFs in 2013 ffs). The ease of use is awesome: just drop a .dll in a folder and you’re done. Want to use another sequencer? Just redirect the plugin path to your VST folder.
Imagine if it had been like that with Max, Maya, Toshop, Flash since 2000. That’s right.
So that’s why to me going full open source open format is not so obvious: if companies are not acting like a bunch of dicks, things are smooth. After all, they are people too.
There’s a very nice thing about a format owned by a company or a consortium, its stability (3 versions of the VST format in almost 20 years). No fork, no weird stuff compromising and breaking apps legacy because someone just started to see the Light, none of that. The bad part with companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google or Apple is they break/close stuff and don’t give a shit (probably because they’re so big). That’s why a lot of people believe that we can’t trust companies to do it right.
But some like Steinberg or Flickr do, and we all benefit in the fairest ways possible. I wish Nintendo would share their 3D camera system in a SDK like Steinberg does with its VST interface. Game developers would spend time on more important stuff and know that moving the character around would be perfect on day one. Quality goes up. Nintendo gets royalties if the game sells. Developers and enthusiasts can use it for free. Everybody wins.