Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
<address@hidden> 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.  If somehow this turn of events resulted in a spike in
>> LilyPond users, that'd be a great boon to the community.
>
>
> To be honest, I think this is a point where Lilypond and MuseScore people
> ought to get together and plan a collective response.

It is worth reminding that by providing high-quality notation tools
for free, both Musescore and LilyPond have been a contributing factor
in both Sibelius' and Finale (see
http://www.makemusic.com/Pressroom/Default.aspx?pid=555) current
problems

It is easy to see how these events could  help lilypond long-term, but
it's also easy for any response from us to be interpreted negatively.
Let the Sibelius users have their personal moment of pain/mourning; if
they need open-source music notation, they will certainly be able to
find us without our help.

> 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.  But at the same time, Sibelius
> is also about beautiful engraving, so there _are_ some who can surely be
> attracted by LP; MuseScore doesn't (yet) have a level of beauty equivalent
> to either Sibelius or Lilypond.

It would be nice if someone from the sibelius team came out and gave
some hints about how the .sib format is structured.  We could be of
help by rescuing the years of work many users have stashed away as
.sib files.

(I had a brief look at the file format years ago; the problem is that
they run some sort of compression scheme over their data)

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen