Hi all,
I want to clear up a big question about the future for Olive. Many people have been asking if Olive will be made available for free or require purchase. The short answer is that when Olive is commercially viable, users will need to purchase a license to use it. There will be a scaling licensing model so some limited functionality/limited channel count versions can be available for free and low cost while larger feature set versions will require a nominal, scaling fee.
The projected pricing for Olive will be comparable to the pricing model of existing popular sequencing software. When you consider the amount of money spent on hardware, lighting, and accessories, the license fee for software is very, very small. You invest about an equal amount of time, if not more, using the currently available free or paid for software to program your animations.
I have asked for help from DLA members to guide the development of Olive. I feel this is the absolute best approach to building the right tool for the community. The idea for creating a new tool isn't to get rich (because that's not going to happen) but to provide a different approach to light animation that I believe is faster and more productive than current workflows allow. Revenues generated from license fees will allows us to continue development, maintain high quality user documentation, travel to symposiums to train users, and promote the holiday lighting experience. In the end, the free market will bare out the products users want.
Between now and then, many free and continually evolving iterations of Olive will be available and free for use and stable enough to rely on. This is my contribution. I thank everyone in advance for contributing ideas and testing the software.
--Matt
P.S. - If you are unable to post a reply to this topic, please PM me so I can let RJ know. Or, could someone PM me and let me know if you're able to reply to this topic. 56 reads and no questions is a little unusual around here. Thank you!