Re: promoting LilyPond

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 03/12/13 22:47, David Kastrup wrote:
> You are aware that the Sibelius development team has been laid off due
> to financial problems of their parent company in spite of Sibelius
> having a paying market and turning a profit?

Yes, fully.  But there is still _a_ Sibelius development team, there is still 
commercial support and maintenance available, etc. etc.  The worries are 
obvious, but only time will tell how damaging this really is to the software.

> Well, you can't lay them off, and you can't prohibit them from
> continuing to work on their software like the original authors of
> Sibelius who have no right to do anything with the sources written by
> themselves any more.
>
> And you can't prohibit anybody else from working on LilyPond in order to
> meet a company's needs.

You should not take my words as an endorsement of non-free software, merely a 
recognition of the factors that many users take into account.  Whether or not we 
like it, there is a general perception that commercially-backed software 
(whatever the licence) is in general more viable and future-proof than 
volunteer-driven efforts.

Yes, the processes of contribution-based free software "break" in different ways 
to the processes of commercial proprietary software -- there are different risks 
and different benefits.  But the fact is, someone using Sibelius now does not 
have to worry about the product being discontinued.  Even if Avid decided to 
discontinue the product, its userbase, brand value and commercial viability 
would mean that someone would step in to buy it.

By contrast, I do worry about what happens to Lilypond if for example you find 
yourself indisposed.  I think we can all agree it would be a severe blow. :-)

> No question about that.  I think a necessary step would be to move to
> GUILE2 first because the costs and tradeoffs of refactoring stuff
> between C++ and Scheme will be different, so this is more or less a
> prerequisite to make decisions and be able to factor in their costs.

Makes sense to me.