bach and Patreon

Discussions, advice, bug reports and much more about the "bach" environment.
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danieleghisi
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bach and Patreon

Post by danieleghisi » Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:16 am

Dear bach users,

As you may have glimpsed if you read this forum, bach development has never stopped: those of you who downloaded the bach 0.8.0.1 prerelease have a glimpse of what’s in preparation. Forthcoming version 0.8.1 will be a major step forward, with lots of bug fixes and new features.

On the other hand, maintaining and improving the bach ecosystem takes significant effort and a good chunk of our time. Most of the work is on the core system (bach), a freelance project with no institutional support, and our old idea of sustaining our work through Paypal donations has not proven very effective. Hence, we decided to switch to a patron-based model and opened a Patreon page at www.patreon.com/bachproject

The idea behind Patreon is that you can select projects you’d like to contribute to for very reasonable monthly donations, and obtain nice rewards in exchange for that. Patrons can support bach for as little as $2 per month and will get various benefits, such as access to prereleases and exclusive video tutorials (probably not many at the beginning, but we'll do our best to try to post at least a video per month).

If you don't use bach, if you think that bach is not worth your money, or if you can’t afford to pay anything, that's absolutely fine and you then should not contribute. However, if you use bach regularly, if you think that it is useful and if you can afford to pay us as little as a cup of coffee per month, then you might want to contribute, because this will help keeping bach alive, maintained, and free for everyone.

Starting from the next distributed version, a splash screen will probably be shown briefly when the first bach object is created in a Max session. Patrons will then get a code to remove the splash screen in their patches for the whole solar year by sending a specific message to bach (on the other hand, removing the splash screen from standalones will require particular arrangements, or modifying yourself the source code—yes, we have plans to adopt an open source license for bach in the next few months).

From now on, the Patreon page will be the place where prereleases are posted. We have posted a 0.8.0.6 prerelease with several improvements, and we hope to post there in july a true release-candidate for 0.8.1, finally solving the font issue still lingering on Max 8.0.5 and 8.0.6 on Windows. Patrons will access these features (along with many other improvements) before everyone else – but in any case they will all become part of bach 0.8.1, to be released later in the year on the website and on the Package Manager.

Of course this forum remains as a place of discussion - but patrons will have a sort of "fast lane" for reporting bugs, and submitting feature requests.

We hope to reach a point at which the number of patrons is enough to make the development of bach reasonably sustainable for us. Many creators and developers already rely on this model, and we would like to do the same.

If any of you decides to become our supporter, that would be amazing and we would be very thankful. If not, don't worry: we still hope you enjoy using the bach library and its siblings.

All the best,
Andrea&Daniele
the bach project team

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