HobbyCore wrote:edit: Reaper is censored. How clever
I suppose from time to time we'll have to repeat the background:
R. was the product of a collaboration of guys who had made their fortunes in music sharing software, sometimes known as music piracy software, depending on your perspective. Not needing the money, but wanting to make a DAW that fit their tastes, they created R and gave it away. Later, they claimed you needed to buy a license, but you could still use the unrestricted demo as long as you liked, so it was still "given away," but in a form that could be called "condoned piracy."
This was at a time when Apple had recently bought Logic and lowered the price by half, apps were being sold for pennies on iOS devices, and it appeared that a business-model based on selling a full-functioned DAW app, with millions of dollars of research and development over decades of experience, might soon be no longer viable. It seemed like a form of app piracy, and it was threatening to put out of business the very experts who had created the business.
So, as it happened, a number of people began trolling the forum with comments about how R. did this or that, and DP couldn't. For the most part, it seemed that these were kids with little experience in music or DAWs, and no experience with DP. Most of what they said about DP was inaccurate; even slight knowledge would have precluded such ridiculous comments. Some of our members tried R., including myself, and found an immature attempt at a DAW, barely able to do the things we require of such a complicated piece of software. Of course, it was getting better, and I'm sure that today it's competitive in whatever niche it was targeted for, but at that time it had a long way to go.
It was obvious that the purpose of the trolling wasn't to provoke discussion or improvement or anything other than to generate unfounded rumors that would float for years in search engines. That, combined with R.'s basic "pirate" business model encouraging users to steal the software (or not discouraging it), despite the nominal sales price that supposedly made it legit, brought the owner of this board to the point of having to make a decision. He has a strict rule about software piracy; it's not allowed, not even a wink-wink sort of ignoring it. If he suspects you of pirating software, you are thrown out of the forum, which is almost the only thing that will get you thrown out. So, James made the decision to censor the word, R., which doesn't affect most conversations, unless you're talking about the Grim Reaper, or harvesting wheat, but even then we clearly get the idea.
We know the word when we see it censored. That's not the point. The point was to avoid the massive build up of unfounded rumors sitting in search engines around the globe, so that every time someone searched for Reaper, they'd see "DP can't do yadda yadda yadda. It's crap compared to Reaper, which does everything you need, better than these old burned-out DAWs." If the statements had been true, it's debatable whether James would have made that decision, but the piracy-centric nature of Reaper at that time would still have probably persuaded him to do the same thing. But the statements were unfounded, the trolling was infantile, and there was really nothing redeeming about most of those threads.
It has been annoying to even some of our long-time members, who might like to discuss Reaper without censorship, but I haven't seen many threads that could discuss it without falling into that same pattern of trashing DP needlessly, and usually with colossal ignorance. For that reason, and out of respect for James and his leadership of this board — with rules that have given us a lot of freedom while eliminating the topics that usually cause forum degradation — I support the continuance of his decision to censor the name. You can still discuss it. We all know what Reaper means. Or you can go elsewhere to discuss it. There's no shortage of forums out there with endless threads about Reaper. But if you discuss it here, you will see the name redacted. It's about those things that come from the seedy side of the internet: piracy, trolling, using unfounded rumor to bias internet searches against a competitor, burying them under tons of lies, to the point that the truth can't even be found, anymore. In other words: politics. And politics is strictly forbidden on this forum.
That's the story, at least as I remember it.
Shooshie
