ROCK from inside-tech

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

@Frank_Daman

I’m just interested, not trying to start a flame war.

@Jonny_Birrell

Valid questions. I’m genuinely interested in having it explained in a non-sanctimonious way, preferably from Roon themselves, whether this is a genuine issue. And why?

I’m going to say a lot about the commercial motivations of a company like Roon Labs. We don’t do this often, but you have to remember that it is very expensive to develop Roon and associated products. We are a business that has the goal of being/staying profitable. We also are growing and would love to continue to grow our team to reach more of our product goals.

@Frank_Daman

Where is the ROCK eula (or equivalent) to be found? […] I find no mention of ROCK not being allowed to be preinstalled by a hardware vendor.

See here. We do not allow ANYONE to redistribute our software without permission. Sections 1.2 and 2.1 both prohibit redistribution.

There are brands out there that license Roon OS for distribution. Inside Tech and others that distribute ROCK are stealing our work.

We didn’t have to give ROCK out for free. We chose to do so because we carefully segmented the DIY people from the turn-key people. Vendors like Inside Tech are violating our T&C, and by blurring the line between DIY and turn-key, they are hurting our turn-key business.

@Frank_Daman

Why should Roon even care? They’ll be making money of the buyer’s subscriptions anyway.

Roon OS was very expensive for us to develop. We had 2 goals to our bottom line with Roon OS: to reduce expenses by reducing support burden and to gain income by licensing Roon OS.

We also were very careful in how we positioned ROCK. It was not meant to be turn-key so it does not compete with our other offering of Roon OS: Nucleus. Nucleus is an important income source for our company. Vendors like Inside Tech mess with our strategy through violation of our T&C. You may say we’ll make money from subscriptions anyway, but who do you think is buying these boxes? New Roon members or existing Roon members? We aren’t making a cent when Inside Tech redistributes our software because all those customers already have Roon licenses.

@Frank_Daman

Why do some posters find it offensive that a hardware vendor claims to sell better hardware than Roon’s? There’s a lot of marketing hyperbole in the audio world, so what does it matter that someone claims to sell superior hardware.

I don’t think anyone is offended. But, these vendors are also lying. I can tell you for sure that putting ROCK in a fan-less case will put undesirable heat stress on your CPU. Nucleus has additional software to help with that issue.

@CrystalGipsy

Roon Bridge and ROCK cannot be pre installed and distributed by third parties, it might be as it then invalidates the licensing they use in their source code thats open source.

That’s a different issue. The licensing issue is about codec patents. That said, it’s unclear if Inside Tech is paying AAC patent fees when they include ffmpeg on their machines. For vendors that license Roon OS, we require they pay these fees. We also pay these fees for Nucleus.

@Jonny_Birrell

What they’re offering clients is that middle ground - for people who perhaps can’t justify the outlay on a Nucleus, and aren’t confident of building a machine to run ROCK - by providing one with it built and pre-installed.

If you can’t afford a Chanel bag, you shouldn’t buy a knockoff. It’s not the same as shoplifting the bag from the store, but it is a form of IP theft that does hurt the business. Either buy the Nucleus (or another brand that compensates us) or go the full DIY route as we intended. These companies are abusing our goodwill towards DIY users and profiting off of our work with no compensation to us.

@Jonny_Birrell

Isn’t the SonicTransporter a pre-installed machine that is seen as a cheaper alternative to Nucleus?

SonicTransporter is not running Roon OS, but it is preinstalled with RoonServer. They had our explicit permission to do this (one of the few from long ago that did get this).