Re: Do we really offer the future?

[Gilles]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2015 20:19:37 -0700, Jim Long wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 04:45:20PM +0200, Gilles wrote:
> > If and when "big" publishers use LilyPond, the result will be more
> > restricted access (through cost) to culture (because they won't 
> > release
> > their proprietary contents).
>
> Forgive me if I've missed important bits of this conversation, but
> I'm not I understand your point here -- can you expand on this
> statement?  Why do you feel that large-scale adoption of OSS (in
> general) will restrict and increase the cost of cultural access?

You are right, the sentence was not clear.  I certainly did not want
to mean that general adoption of OSS will have bad side effects.[1]
Here I just meant that when publishing companies create new editions
of out-of-copyright contents (e.g. works composed more than 100 years
ago), the editing work is under copyright (and rightly so) and they
choose the license (and rightly so).  I just doubt that they will
settle on something like "Creative Commons".[2]
What I meant is that if the work is edited and published by a public
institution, it should[3] be released under a protective license.[4]
LilyPond makes that endeavour possible.[5]


Regards,
Gilles

[1] Although the license question is a central issue, unless one
    does not care how the software is used (in the real world).
[2] I don't imply that all music should be given away for free:
    Contemporary composers create contents and have all the rights
    to publish under whatever license suits them.
[3] That's what I consider the duty of "public" service (that
    works thanks to the public's contribution).
[4] That allows free usage and has some provision to discourage
    "free rides".
[5] Because it is free software, the data (music contents) does
    not risk getting stale and the printed output will always be
    as beautiful as the version of LilyPond could make it at the
    the time of the encoding (assuming that computers, PDF readers,
    and printers are still available in the future).