Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[Hilary Snaden]

On 2012-08-06 04:04, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> 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.

I agree. As with other software, some Sibelius users may feel happier 
paying inaccessible developers and their managers, directors, 
shareholders, etc, for closed-source software which stores their work in 
non-human-readable, undocumented binary formats. The rest can easily 
find the LilyPond software, website, manuals, snippets and mailing lists.

> 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.

That may be a while off yet. According to Wikipedia "A Facebook pressure 
group has been formed to protest against the closure of the London 
office. A website dedicated to encouraging Avid to sell Sibelius to 
ensure its continued development is now live."

The latter claims that Avid intends to offshore further coding work to 
Ukraine.

> (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)

Was the compression recognisable?