Re: Supporting my work on LilyPond financially

[Carl Peterson]

On Dec 1, 2013 1:47 AM, "David Kastrup" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Noeck <address@hidden> writes:

> > 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.

> 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?
>

Here are the problems I run into: (1) most musicians/composers/institutions are already using something. This means that the first hurdle is overcoming the inertia of "I already have x, why should I switch? Which leads to (2) even if I can demonstrate that LP overcomes the technical difficulties of another notation program, people are going to be reluctant to switch because of the perceived difficulty of learning LP syntax or working without the UI bells and whistles of Finale, etc. They will also say, "Well, it's not *that* bad of a problem."

I frequently advocate the simplicity of setting SATB hymns in LP to the hymn writers and composers of my personal acquaintance (using the template I've mentioned on other threads). My standard response whenever they talk about a workaround for a provlem in Finale is, "Or you could just use Lilypond." They acknowledge that LP would probably make their work much easier, but too many are too invested in Finale at this point to make the switch.

The major hurdle LP faces is that others were there first. History generally bears this out. 20+ years ago, WordPerfect was *the* word processor for MS-DOS, and with good reason. It could run circles around Microsoft Word. What led to its downfall was that as programs started to migrate to Windows, MS Word launched a Windows version several months before WordPerfect could. By the time WP for Windows came out, people had already gone to Word. The sad part of this example is that WP was, even as late as the mid-00s, a superior product, particularly for business use. LP came out in the midst of other packages that already existed. As a result, it is fighting for marketshare in a relatively mature market. Granted, it is possible to overcome this hurdle, as Google Chrome seems to be doing in the Browser Wars, but it takes something special for that to happen. In the case of Firefox and Chrome, that something was IE's truly abysmal performance in the IE 6-8 years. Finale and Sibelius may have issues, but I don't think they've reached that level for the average user.

Carl P.