Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2012 at 03:02:34PM +0100, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 02/08/12 14:49, address@hidden wrote:
> >If you guys can get a Google Grant for your LilyPond non-profit
> >in the Netherlands, now would be a fantastic time to run ads on
> >Google getting Sibelius users to check out LilyPond. It's sad
> >that it takes an event like this to generate interest in open
> >source software, but at the same time, it'd be a huge waste of
> >money and time if these people tried to somehow revive
> >Sibelius.

Wouldn't a google grant be better put towards making lilypond
better?  Like, having a stable release or fixing graphical
collisions?

> On a practical level, it's likely that many Sibelius users will just
> not want to switch to a tool like Lilypond -- the whole point of
> Sibelius is a graphical score editor.  MuseScore is a more natural
> home for them, and is probably the only free tool they'd consider.

There's actually a few other projects mentioned in the latest
LilyPond Report (which doesn't seem to be advertising itself on
the user list any more?  let alone on the main lilypond website?)
that could also occupy this niche.


(slight re-arrangement)
> To be honest, I think this is a point where Lilypond and MuseScore
> people ought to get together and plan a collective response.
> 
> Working together to present the two leading faces of free music
> engraving software could help to get the most possible interest and
> engagement.

Well, they have the email address of our development mailing list.

I've heard this "work together more" idea a few times, but I have
no clue what that would entail.  What could LilyPond do to make
GUI front-ends easier to write, better for users, etc?
- faster compiling?  that's already a good goal, and has nothing
  to do with GUIs specifically.  We could *all* appreciate a
  faster compile without sacrificing beauty, and many people
  would also appreciate the ability to choose an even faster
  compile at the expense of some beauty.  The code is there, the
  previous discussions are there on -devel; nothing's stopping
  people from working on this!
  (other than the poor state of the Contributor's Guide, but
  that's also a general problem with lilypond, nothing specific
  to GUIs)
- stable syntax?  it would certainly be a pain to maintain a
  front-end that has to create different ly files based on which
  version the user has installed.  But a stable syntax is another
  non-GUI-specific good thing, and we're already very seriously
  planning work on this on -devel.
- have a big link-exchange on our websites?
- ...?

What else could we do to "work together"?  (be it with musescore,
denemo, laborejo, elysium, etc)

- Graham