Re: Lilypond lobbying?

[Mike Solomon]

On Aug 18, 2011, at 2:45 PM, Neil Thornock wrote:

> It may be that the will want the FinSib file of the winning piece and
> only have editing capabilities with one of those two formats.
> 
> Still, it's sad.
> 

I didn't think of this...you're right that it's possible, but given the 
numerous hacks one can do in either of these formats to freeze line breaks / 
position / etc. and given how terrible the scores can look if one starts to 
break these hacks to devise alternate paginations / page sizes / headers / 
footers / etc., I think that if this is the case, then the rule was created by 
people who aren't anticipating the crazy stuff that composers will do with 
Finale or are shaping their decision in light of the perceived edibility of the 
score.

What it may be worth lobbying for, then, is simply that people hold composers 
(or anyone, really) to the standard of being able to reproduce their scores in 
a set of reasonable substitute formats and to edit their scores along 
reasonable guidelines when requested.  Reasonable is, say, A4 to letter paper, 
but not quicktime movie to A4 paper (or if this is the case, it needs to be a 
flip-book of A4 paper).  It is trivial in LilyPond to add "edited by so and so" 
to the bottom of a document, and while this is an extra burden for the 
composer, by outsourcing the burden to the submitting composer / musicologist / 
whoever, it opens up participation to a wider range of people.

My original question still stands, though.  I think that it is worth it for a 
community of users of any free software (where I mean free in every sense of 
the term) to be active in contacting organizations whose rules are hostile to 
the free usage of software.  It helps organizations learn about free software 
(both the software itself and the mentality of freedom behind the software), 
thereby encouraging these organizations to adopt policies that are conducive to 
this type of free-ness / free-dom.

Cheers,
MS