Creative computer applications are a niche, and a relatively small one at that. Even brand-leading proprietary software companies like Steinberg, the developers of the long-established Cubase music sequencer, have been recently bought out. Consolidation in the creative application market has seen Adobe buy Syntrillium, who created Cool Edit, Avid buy Digidesign and Apple buy Logic—and there are plenty of other examples. What this means is that a handful of multinational companies could now effectively monopolise the gateway to creative expression, at least as far as computers are concerned. This might not be an issue if it were not for the wide proliferation of powerful, general purpose computer hardware in the first world.

In addition, the internet, and by extension the personal computer, are now the principal channel for distribution of creative works in many fields. Proprietary tools on the creative desktop mean proprietary formats will dominate the internet, now that it is no longer a purely textual medium. The landscape today for “industry standard” creative software on the proprietary platforms looks a bit like this:

Not much choice here…

In case you’ve heard Apple described as the creative alternative or competitor to Microsoft, we should not forget that back in 1997, before the launch of OS X, Microsoft actually invested $150 million dollars in Apple. That’s not something a company usually does with a competitor. More recently, Adobe and Macromedia have announced a partnership, although it’s not yet clear what form that partnership will take. What is clear is that there is less real choice in “industry standard” creative software than ever.

The retail cost of just the software listed here for a single computer runs into thousands of euros. The high cost of entry to this field helps maintain the artificial distinction between consumers and producers. Now of course the software companies who make these programs would say that they represent great value for money, and that educational institutions can benefit from generous discounts. On the first point, it would be fair to mention that as mass access to personal computers has brought the cost of hardware down, the creative applications haven’t followed suit. Quark Xpress was really expensive in 1995 and it still costs a lot today.

A handful of multinational companies could now effectively monopolise the gateway to creative expression

To answer the second point, I believe proprietary software in education, even with discounts, represents a hidden subsidy from the state to the manufacturers of this software. If we look at one Adobe educational pack on offer in the UK for example, it appears very reasonably priced at £9.99 per seat. But a school or college needs to buy 200 seats to get that price, i.e. pay nearly two thousand pounds, in order to run feature-limited “Elements” versions of just two applications. What this means is that taxpayers around the world are sending millions of dollars every year to fund proprietary software development, and yet many schools and colleges still can’t afford to put a full set of creative tools in front of each student.

Even if the software was practically free, consider the value to a company like Adobe that every graduate of the creative disciplines around the world leaves college with training in their software—which the company doesn’t contribute to directly at all. Even the potential funding benefits of corporate taxation for education are offset by the fact that most, if not all multinational software companies use offshore accounting.

It’s certainly the case that artists in a number of disciplines are using GNU/Linux and other free software—free in both the economic sense and the political sense—to realise their ambitions. It would also be fair to say that this software is only just starting to penetrate the consciousness of the mainstream. But how can we make it practical for the average computer user?

The 64-bit question

Since any software project takes a while to get to a mature stage, when I launched a start-up earlier this year, I decided to concentrate on the kind of desktop systems which I believe will be common among creative users in the future. We’ve had native 64-bit Linux on the Alpha and the Itanium for years, but these architectures never reached the mainstream desktop—and I don’t think they ever will. SGI now has an Itanium2 based GNU/Linux desktop product aimed at the creative market, but it costs US$20,000 per machine.

Compared to Windows or any other operating system, GNU/Linux clearly has a head start on x86_64, and you can choose from a number of natively compiled desktop distributions for the platform. Unfortunately for the creative user, all of these are aimed at the general purpose audience. It’s impossible to be all things to all people, and what’s good for the so-called consumer is rarely right for the content creator.

GNU/Linux clearly has a head start on x86_64

For example, typical distributions use Arts or ESD to share the sound card between applications, while many GNU/Linux musicians would want to use JACK—admittedly more complex, but far more powerful. (I was asked recently what was so difficult about JACK that means it isn’t found as the primary sound server in any mainstream GNU/Linux distribution. I don’t think it is difficult to use, but for the time being it still requires a patched kernel, and some knowledge of sample rates and buffers. Many users just want to be able to throw audio at any sample rate to the soundcard, and could care less about real-time priority.)

In addition, the creative user’s default selection of applications would be very different to—for example—a sysadmin. Even gigantic distributions like Debian don’t package all of the specialist tools needed for media creation, and the integration between packages is often less than perfect. So the goal of 64 Studio Ltd. is to create a native x86_64 distribution with a selected set of creative tools and as much integration between them as possible.

The 64 Studio default desktop is a slimmed-down Gnome install