Re: Thinking about putting together a grant to support development on LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

> 2012/2/8 Nils <address@hidden>:
>> I have only read half of this thread, but is it about finding people
>> or supporting the existent Lilypond Developers with money to do
>> their regular great work?
>
> More of the latter, but to make it possible it might be necessary to
> find some people first.  I.e. there are small chances to receive a
> "grant for David Kastrup".

This is more or less what it boils down to at the moment, simply because
I am, as it seems, currently the only person who is single-minded enough
to not be able to do a "regular" job in parallel with keeping focus on
LilyPond enough to make a difference.

In my mind, this is not supposed to be a money sink rather than a
starting investment: I hope to contribute to making LilyPond a serious
option for further investments.

LilyPond has a few things going for it:

there is a large inheritage of great music that is already in the public
domain.  LilyPond would be a great contender for maintaining publically
accessible databases of importance.  What is needed for that is a
robustness in the sources:

a) getting serious quality without version-specific tweaks
b) a dependable upgrade plan when LilyPond advances
c) good conversion to MusicXML
d) possibly also good import
e) good human readability in case machine translation fails for some
   reason
f) reasonably easy machine readability outside of LilyPond

Maintaining a cultural database in proprietary formats like Finale is a
recipe for trouble: if at one point company or format or compatibility
fail, the content becomes inaccessible.  This is a big selling point for
LilyPond, and if it makes progress in some other areas, it will become
interesting for this sort of task also outside of the public domain
area.  If it becomes commercially viable to reissue classics using a
public LilyPond database as a starting point, there will be a sizable
market for LilyPond skills.

But I don't see us there yet, and a good part of my focus is on work
leading there.

-- 
David Kastrup