Re: Supporting my work on LilyPond financially

[David Kastrup]

Noeck <address@hidden> writes:

> 2) Private donations from hobby users:
> Probably most users are not paid for their music engraving. If LP would
> not exist (nor some other free (as in free beer) software), they might
> have to pay for Finale (600$) or Sibelius (550€). But probably they
> would go with a light version of these programs (50$ - 120€). Just to
> have an idea what would be to spend otherwise (without LP).
> I write this to both sides: Spending about 100€ in 2 years is quite a
> lot if you use LP just for fun,

€1 per week...  It does add up.  In my experience, the smallest regular
donation that does work is about €10.  Smaller monthly donations tend to
cease after few months, probably because the donor thinks his
contribution would not be noticed.  Of course, the best scheme is making
an automatic payment scheme which the bank continues on its own, with an
amount that is small enough that one is too lazy to cancel it.  In the
long run, this makes quite a difference.

> not spending anything is quite cheap for such a great program.

To be clear: the €50 per year number alone would require several hundred
participants to keep one developer active.  You don't get that from a
mailing list: you need to reach the end user masses for that.

Ardour does it in that manner while remaining under the GPL, but it's
somewhat on the obnoxious side (downloading binaries requires a
donation, they sell proprietary add-ons).  That software is basically
owned by its core developer and so he gets to make the calls.  It's not
really an option for LilyPond, both because it is a community project
and because it is a GNU project.

> 3) Private donations from professionals:
> If professionals could be convinced that spending the money on LP
> development rather than on commercial products is beneficial also for
> them that would be great. How? Does someone have a closer relation to
> this occupational group than I do and has any ideas how to promote LP?

Probably half of the large donors are one-person music publishers.  If
you take a look at music publisher registers, you'll find that in
Germany alone there are several hundreds, and you'll find a few
long-term contributors to LilyPond among them.

I have no idea for a good sales pitch here: many of the small and
actually also large publishers will be wed to a particular workflow.

> 4) Donations/payments from institutions:
> I can not guess the user base, but I assume that institutional support
> is needed for sustainability and long term support. So far I have only
> heard about musicians in the LP community who are very tech-savvy and/or
> use linux anyway.

No, I think we have a fair amount of Windows users (probably more than
GNU/Linux).

> Somehow the benefits of LP should be made clearer for music/composing
> professors the fact that many things can be made doable which are not
> up to now with any program.

Those things in general are hard to to in LilyPond, and they are
generally hard to do, period.  Our main selling point should be things
that are easy to do.  LilyPond should be the first, not the last resort.

> And music teachers/schools could support it as licences for engraving
> software are mostly unaffordable for schools, but if everything is set
> up, pupils can write { a4 g f } and learn a program that everyone can
> use at home.

Sound-proof practice rooms are way more expensive than most software,
and most software offers student licensing schemes.

> So, in my opinion, universities and schools should be convinced of LP,
> because 100€ for a single person is quite something, but a remarkably
> good project which can bring some good publicity could be worth much
> more for such institutions.

Here €100 a year is about the tuition to expect for a public music
school for one pupil.

> I personally don't understand why LP is not common at music
> universities but that's probably a chicken-or-the-egg thing and the
> lack of large scale marketing. But this would also need official
> contacts in the LP team who are responsible and can represent LP
> towards these institutions.

Institutions mean projects, projects mean support, support means a
reliable base of available professionals.

Convert three musicians you know to using LilyPond.  If you go
"I couldn't get _him_ or _her_ to use it", then how to pitch LilyPond to
someone you don't even have contact with?  Think about _why_ you could
not get a friend of yours to use it.  What would need to happen so that
you could?  Have you tried?  What did you learn when doing so?

> My summary: LP would need either a large user base with small
> donations (like wikipedia partly) or institutions behind it (I'm
> thinking about the Document Foundation or Linux, in this case more
> about universities).

"LilyPond" as such would need public projects like EU projects.  But to
tap those, we need a reliable way to turn money into code and music, and
that means extending programmer accessibility and user accessibility,
and infrastructure availability.  Mutopia is barely breathing.

-- 
David Kastrup