Re: Do we really offer the future?

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Gilles (et al.),

> To whom LilyPond should strive to "offer the future”?

To everyone it possibly can.  ;)

> IMHO, certainly not to the "[...] big house[s] with traditions,
> regulations and limitations”.

Why not? What’s to say that Lilypond can’t initially fit within those 
traditions, regulations, and limitations, while providing benefits (financial 
and otherwise) to those “big houses”, and can’t eventually help a “big house” 
move past those limitations while maintaining whatever traditions and 
regulations they see as indispensible?

> What's for the LilyPond team in spending resources trying to work around
> those self-inflicted limitations?

Let’s say, for discussion’s sake, we convince a Warner-Chappell, Boosey & 
Hawkes, or Barenreiter to use Lilypond as their primary engraving application. 
You honestly don’t see the potential upsides of that situation? Do you not 
remember the tipping point when OpenOffice was embraced over Microsoft Office 
as the official office application suite by certain governments?

> LilyPond is "[...] a program that creates beautiful sheet music following
> the best traditions of classical music engraving." (excerpt from
> "http://www.lilypond.org/introduction.html";)
> 
> I think that this goal is way more important (to users)
> than trying to convince publishers.

To certain users? Absolutely.
To a majority of users? Possibly.
To all users? Doubtful.

In any case, those aren't mutually exclusive goals. Quite the contrary: almost 
tautologically, the easier it is for an abstract user to “create beautiful 
sheet music following the best traditions of classical music engraving”, the 
easier it will be to convince a given publisher to become a user.

> A project like Mutopia is a promising future

I disagree rather strongly. Mutopia (at least currently) appears to me to be a 
rather damning example of the failure of the open-source philosophy to be able 
to make a broad and lasting impact on its intended market. Worse, far too many 
of the examples there are not, to my eye, “beautiful sheet music following the 
best traditions of classical music engraving”; I would, for example, never send 
someone there if I was trying to impress them with Lilypond’s engraving output.

> If and when "big" publishers use LilyPond, the result will be more
> restricted access (through cost)

Cost of what? Lilypond wouldn’t ever cost any more.

> to culture (because they won't release
> their proprietary contents)

Nor would we necessarily want them to.

> I've thought for a long time that the right way to go is to seek
> public funds for engraving public domain contents with the purpose
> of publishing it under a GPL-like (or Creative Commons) license.

That’s a fine goal… but shouldn’t in any way distract the Lilypond community 
from more important goals which would more immediately and significantly 
benefit the ‘Pond (and beyond). IMHO, one of those more important goals would 
be making a major inroad into the rather small walled city that is the 
commercial music publishing world.

Cheers,
Kieren.
________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden