[gkhartman]

This is great. Makes these tools much more discoverable. I can help but notice the drop in plugin ui quality one you click the foss filter checkbox. Something in me wants a foss plugin to come with a cool skin like the free ones do, but I know that's silly.

[dylan604]

It really says something about designers when there's so few of them contributing to FOSS projects. It also says something about FOSS devs that they don't/can't find better UI for their projects. Especially for web based UIs where CSS isn't that hard to look at sites you want to emulate and get much much closer to a respectable UI.

[jpetso]

A not-so-insignificant number of FOSS developers are well able to make quality UIs, but decide to charge for their more polished creations.

Between having to make a living somehow, and not reaping a whole lot of other personal benefits from open source audio development, it takes a very special kind of person to publish these contributions in the first place. Once they're published, generally with its UI defined in code by a developer person, they're not necessarily easy for a designer to edit.

Nor is there much of a steady community around most of the plugins. So many are "publish, feature-complete enough, move on" kind of projects.

As always, be the change you want to see in the world.

[Blackthorn]

Surge and vital have great UIs.