Re: bounties

[Joseph Wakeling]

On 06/21/2010 06:37 PM, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> However, for me personally -- i.e., how I will spend my assistance and 
> sponsorship time, money, and effort -- trying to make Lilypond a better 
> *composing* tool is a total non-issue, whereas fixing the innumerable 
> *engraving* problems remaining to be solved is everything.

I think that's a pretty good priority for Lilypond in general, actually.
 I mean, there are things that can be done, like enhanced MIDI
performance (dynamics, articulation, ...) that could help make Lilypond
a better tool for sketching out compositional ideas and producing demos
of pieces, but engraving is the key strength Lilypond has and it should
play to it.

I would step back from that slightly and say that say that what makes
Lilypond great is _engraving without cheating_ -- i.e. its source
notation is in general a precise representation of the musical content
(meaning as well as appearance).

Its use of a well-defined human-readable semantic markup is also a big
plus, particularly when it comes to archiving.

>> You'll be fine raising grant money as long as you make case studies of 
>> typesetting and theses.
> 
> That's probably an accurate assessment, at least in the immediate term. I 
> think the point about "non-serviced communities" (e.g., unsighted, less 
> affluent, etc.) is a good one, too. Platform options (i.e., emerging devices, 
> where FinSib likely won't go) will become important very soon. And so on.

True, but you have to be careful that the grant gets used to develop a
viable, supported long term solution to whatever you're trying to
achieve, not just something that permits the people involved to write
enough research articles to make themselves look good to the funding agency.

I'm not sure about emerging devices, or rather, it seems there are a
bunch of optimizations and improvements that would be needed to see
Lilypond becoming a serious contender on mobile or low-power devices
etc.  I'm speaking purely from the experience of trying to compile
Valentin's opera on my laptop. :-)

> Personally, I'm not trying to "sell Lilypond to universities", at least not 
> in the way that particular phrase suggests (i.e., convince them to replace 
> their current FinSib setup with Lilypond). I'm trying to make a case to a 
> well-funded university (Rice) with a proven track record in the development 
> and promotion of digital, open, on-demand publishing (Connexions) and a 
> fabulous music school (Shepherd School) that there might be a great way to 
> extend their publishing platform into the [essentially untapped] sphere of 
> print music, and simultaneously support the development of an open-source 
> application/community.

Agree about 'selling to universities' in that sense -- it's exactly what
is likely to get the « Dans le cul de ta mère! » kind of response that
Valentin received. :-P

Your connection with Rice sounds very interesting.  I don't know what
your exact proposal is, but one thing I would be interested in is the
development of 'free/open scholarly urtext editions' -- think Project
Gutenberg but for music, not just the kind of 'engrave the old Breitköpf
edition' stuff that you see from random enthusiasts on IMSLP, but
carefully-prepared expert-scholarship urtext editions with well defined
editorial guidelines, etc. etc.

Take the Neue Mozart Ausgabe as an example -- it's available to browse
free online, but it's _ridiculous_ that this scholarly archive of
Mozart's texts is still under proprietary lock and key in this day and
age.  The scholarly and music-professional consequences of having a
high-quality open archive that anyone can access and derive from are
fairly profound.

So, if you can persuade Rice to take up that kind of challenge -- kind
of 'O'Reilly for music publishing' -- you'll have done something rather
marvellous, IMO.

Best wishes,

    -- Joe