Roon does hardware [Nucleus introduced in Munich]

[JWC (Jim)]

But more to the point–it’s not an accident that ROCK is being made available free of charge–there are plenty of people like you that we need to serve well, too, and we want you to have the same quality of experience as people who buy the box. If you’re capable of building and supporting media server hardware yourself, do that and install ROCK.

I think it’s appropriate to speak to what an amazing commitment Roon Labs is making to the present user community with the above comment. It bears repeating that the yearly or lifetime subscription to the Roon software is expected to grant the purchaser all updates and new features to Roon Software itself. ROCK/RoonOS is a customized operating system to ease installation and optimize performance of RoonServer, but represents a distinct development effort by the RoonLabs team. There is a strong temptation to mentally lump these two together, but nothing in conventional software development pricing structures and practices obligates RoonLabs to offer ROCK at no additional charge.

I think Microsoft presents it is a useful analogy to provide context. The suite of Microsoft Office products are now offered as a subscription service to customers. As long as one is current on the monthly/yearly fee, one can expect full updates an improvements related to Microsoft Office. However, this does not entitle the Office365 subscriber to a free Windows10 license. Windows is sold as a separate product, and probably always will be. As an analogy to Nucleus, it is certainly possible to build a high end Windows10 desktop computer more cheaply than the prices charged by Dell, but a) the price of Windows10 is rolled into the Dell price, and b) people are willing to pay more for something that just works with no assembly required.

Of course, there are business benefits to RoonLabs making ROCK available free of charge in order to reduce support burden and broaden its user base. However, it would not be out of line for them to charge separately for RoonOS or force you to buy their hardware in order to access that development stream. We don’t see Sonore distributing its SonicOrbiter OS free to all users who would like to buy their own RPi or other DIY solution. You have to buy the SOSE or microRendu.

If you can’t understand why anyone would pay extra for a Nucleus instead of building their own NUC, buy the NUC, install ROCK, and be happy. At the same time, please do recognize that nowhere in the Roon agreement are they compelled to offer ROCK/RoonOS free of charge. If we as a community complain too much about unexpected free perks extending outside of the core Roon software, RoonLabs may not feel so inclined to make them free in the future.