Re: New Sibelius to LilyPond conversion suite

[Carl Sorensen]

On 2/4/10 3:53 PM, "Michael Good" <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
> LilyPond may be free software, but it has more lock-in than nearly any current
> commercial music notation product. Scores can only be imported into LilyPond
> format. They can never be moved effectively from LilyPond to another notation
> program.

This is true.  But why should the LilyPond team develop converters from a
free format to a proprietary format?  There's no financial incentive to do
so, and there's no moral incentive to do so.

> 
> MusicXML was invented to get rid of this type of proprietary format lock-in.

LilyPond is not a proprietary format lock-in.  It may be a lock-in, but it
is a lock-in to an open, free format.

It is also true that MusicXML is an open format.  So I can see some moral
incentive to move from LilyPond to MusicXML.  But there's not enough
developer resource on the LilyPond team to do all that we want to do with
LilyPond, let alone worry about getting things out of LilyPond and into
other formats.

The interest for doing this would come most likely from somebody who wants
to convert some kind of LilyPond archive (e.g. Mutopia) into another format.
Anybody who had that interest would certainly receive help from the LilyPond
development team.

> Most commercial products added MusicXML export years ago, either directly or
> via plug-ins. It is unfortunate that LilyPond users cannot take advantage of
> the same data freedom that Finale and Sibelius users can.

It is true that LilyPond users do not currently have access to a tool that
converts LilyPond input data files to MusicXML.  But LilyPond users do have
access to all of the LilyPond sources, so they can modify the program at
will to meet their needs.

And everybody in the world has all the information available about LilyPond,
including source code, data formats, parsing trees, etc.  So although a
MusicXML exporter has not been developed, the only barrier to doing so is
interest.  Nobody has wanted to do so.

> 
> We hope in the future that LilyPond will be as supportive of the open MusicXML
> format as most commercial software. If there is already a converter from
> LilyPond to MusicXML that I have missed, please let me know. If my objections
> are out of date, that would be excellent news!

Would you consider it a net gain for the world if LilyPond were commercial
software, and used the revenues from sales to support the development of a
LilyPond to MusicXML converter?  Personally, I would not. I would much
rather have data lock-in with an excellent open source engraving software
than have no open-source engraver but the ability to readily move data among
different proprietary music notation systems.  Given my thoughts on this
matter, it's not likely that I'll take my limited LilyPond development time
and use it to develop a MusicXML converter.  Instead, I'll try to improve
LilyPond itself.

Thanks for your comments, and thanks for participating in the discussion.

Carl