Re: bounties

[Joseph Wakeling]

On 06/15/2010 09:19 PM, Graham Percival wrote:
> One idea I've toyed with is seeking a grant to work on lilypond.
> Various governments and agencies give research grants; I'm pretty
> certain that we could get a grant to improve medieval chant
> notation or contemporary non-Western scales or whatnot.  However,
> this would probably require
> - a bunch of grant applications
> - collaborating with some musicologists (i.e. a medieval chant
>   expert, or John Cage scholar, or whatever)
> - overhead of writing reports about deliverables, giving
>   presentations to people, etc.
> - etc.
> In the process of doing the specialized notation, the developer
> might fix a few "normal" bugs as well.

An alternative would be to go directly to the institutions that have an
interest in notation software -- the (many) music colleges.  Most of
these have large numbers of computers with either or both of Finale and
Sibelius installed (to say nothing of other music software), and if I
recall right, that means a fairly large payout _per computer_.

Take a message to multiple music colleges, demonstrate Lilypond's
coolest features, emphasise the fact that it is and always will be free
both as in beer and freedom, the cool features, and then ask for
development support on the order of the cost of 3 Sibelius desktop licenses.

Multiply that out across multiple institutions across the whole of
Europe and it could add up to a fairly substantial amount of money.

Best wishes,

    -- Joe