Re: promoting LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> On 02/12/13 16:00, David Kastrup wrote:
>> How about companies which cannot risk getting locked in to software that
>> may stop being maintained in future?
>
> I'm not sure that's a selling point, either.  As long as there's a
> paying market, commercial software tends to keep getting maintained.

You are aware that the Sibelius development team has been laid off due
to financial problems of their parent company in spite of Sibelius
having a paying market and turning a profit?

> By contrast the risk with Lilypond is that it's vulnerable to the
> continuing contributions of a fairly small set of core volunteers.

Well, you can't lay them off, and you can't prohibit them from
continuing to work on their software like the original authors of
Sibelius who have no right to do anything with the sources written by
themselves any more.

And you can't prohibit anybody else from working on LilyPond in order to
meet a company's needs.

> Graham pointed out to me not so long ago that a problem with new
> enthusiastic contributors is that they can come, "fix" some issue and
> in the process break so much stuff that it costs far more time to
> correct it than to just reject the contribution out of hand and have
> one of the existing developers do the work. Trying to think about how
> the codebase could be refactored so that this isn't likely to happen
> seems to me to be a potentially productive way to expand and engage
> the Lilypond community.

No question about that.  I think a necessary step would be to move to
GUILE2 first because the costs and tradeoffs of refactoring stuff
between C++ and Scheme will be different, so this is more or less a
prerequisite to make decisions and be able to factor in their costs.

-- 
David Kastrup