The $60 dollar DAW (with unending uncrippled trial) killed Sonar.

jamesyoyo
If Gibson goes belly up, who is going to enforce these rights? Or more importantly, who would care?

If Gibson goes through bankruptcy liquidation, then someone will probably buy up the patents and IP for Sonar and the rest of the Cakewalk products. Then they'll enforce their patents, even if they don't actually plan to make use of them in their own products. 
 
I could be wrong and someone nice buys the IP and plays nice by resuming development. But that seems unlikely once all the key developers have scattered to the corners of the development universe. Any bankruptcy liquidation isn't likely to happen for quite a while and all the developers still need to feed their families.

^This is most likely what's going to happen.  They aren't going to get much for what's left of Cake, but they will have to pay off creditors, and they will use the sale of Cake IP in part to do that.

You know what I'd do now if I was interested in buying Cake's technology?

Nothing.

Because whatever price I might get for it now I'm very likely to be able to get it for less in the possible, even likely, Gibson bankruptcy fire sale. Gibson guitars are likely to continue under a new ownership structure even if the current company is bankrupted. So are other bits of Gibson that make money or can be easily made to make money once detached from a parent company in severe financial and managerial difficulties.

Cakewalk, on the other hand, is unlikely to be worth more in six months than it is now and is probably going to be eventually sold at a rock-bottom price. The longer Sonar isn't available to buy the lower that price will be.

From a potential purchaser's point of view, unless they intend to keep Cake trading continuously waiting to see what happens might well be the wisest move.

tlw
Cakewalk, on the other hand, is unlikely to be worth more in six months than it is now and is probably going to be eventually sold at a rock-bottom price. The longer Sonar isn't available to buy the lower that price will be.

They likely wouldn't even be buying the Cakewalk Source code. That would just come along as part of the patents and IP.  Sad to say, but I don't expect to see any real new code for Cakewalk SONAR. The only thing I hope for is the unlock key sent to each "owner" of a copy of SONAR. I think it is reasonable to expect that and nothing more.
 

I wonder will we ever hear what happened to Cakewalk, Sonar etc and/or why?
 
I suspect we will not.
 
At some point next few weeks or next week once this black friday / thanksgiving thing is over Cake customers might get an email which wont say much that has not been said already, then a farewell with unlock codes for when server dies.
 
I have a gut feeling all this will get wrapped up very soon inc these forums. Seems to be the way this whole thing has been rolling.

I have been using cakewalk for decades, since pro audio 9. This is what gets me upsets about the software industry. It is like a double edge sword. On one hand you have people that pirate software, and then on the other hand you have people that spend their hard earned money purchasing software. When a company sells software software it is like they just toss customers aside like a sack of potatoes. I am not talking about the employees I am %100 sure a great deal of them cared about the work they have done. It is not like sonar is a useless software in fact other than pro tools it is a top contender in the daw world. The only reason Gibson it still providing access to the site for downloads and activation is because they probably would get sued. They gave no email notification to customers especially those that purchased lifetime updates. I would have not purchase it if I would have known in a years time they were going to scrap it. What do customers get for lifetime updates. Nothing except access to softwarw they legally and legitimately purchased. They should at least compensated customers with downloads of all their plugins and addons for Sonar. I am just hoping they give us some way of activating sonar even after they shut site down for good. Or remove activation thanks for listening

This arguments is silly since piracy is already an option for the unscrupulous. I doubt a sudden surge in interest in sonar to kickstart a piracy campaign among users who don't already own

Cakewalk is dead yet Kanye is still alive... Go figure!