In my world, a paywall is something that stops you from getting access to something without paying for it.
The Ardour "paywall" does not do that.
You may not like the "cost" of the alternative (e.g. finding someone else who already has the Windows version, or learning to build it yourself, or getting someone else to build it for you), but those costs are, I would claim, not part of the "paywall".
If you had said "ardour.org doesn't offer ready-to-run binaries unless you pay something for them", I would not even have commented.
You're saying "oh, well, they don't provide no-charge downloads, so it's paywalled" is a comment that to me basically ignores what makes libre software libre software.
If looks like you're not considering a resource to be behind a paywall if there's a way to get it via other means, without paying.
I'd say the opposite is true, you can put content behind a paywall in one place, even if it is freely (libre and/or gratis) available elsewhere. Wikipedia has a page called "List of public domain resources behind a paywall" [1], this seems a nice example. To me Ardour binaries are another.
You are walking down a road in a small town. On the left, one of the residents, is selling freshly cut sunflowers for $2.99 a bunch. You ask them if you can have a bunch for free, and they say no. You keep walking. A few blocks up ahead, you come across another resident who has put a bucket of cut sunflowers in front of the their yard, free for the taking.
Are the sunflowers "behind a paywall" in any functional sense? Does the fact that one possible place to get them requires payment mean anything when they are available at no cost elsewhere?
In my view the sunflowers are behind a paywall at that particular place on the left.
The functional sense seems very relative. For people who cannot go further, all sunflowers are behind a paywall. For people who can, it’s just that, i.e. they also have access to sunflowers not behind a paywall.
To be clear, I’d say the resident on the left (or Ardour for that matter) is in no way worse because they’re offering paid sunflowers. They have every right to do so. And something must be good about their offer if people are buying from them (location, authority, desire to support their business, perhaps all of the above).
As I’ve said, its downloads are. E.g. here: https://community.ardour.org/download?architecture=x86_64&ty...
> The only thing you cannot do is to get a ready-to-run binary without charge from ardour.org itself.
This is what I’m referring to as a paywall.
For a casual Windows user, source code or Linux repositories are unhelpful, as the website itself states.
> You can opt to pay as little as US$1 for that, however.
A low paywall is still a paywall.