Re: promoting LilyPond

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> On 04/12/13 10:33, David Kastrup wrote:
>> Uh, the original developers of Sibelius made Avid an offer for buying
>> Sibelius back.  The offer was turned down.
>
> Happy to have this discussion if you want it, but I think it's getting
> away from the point I wanted to make.

It's not really a discussion: I am just reiterating points already made
a lot of times with regard to Free Software.  Corporate parents can
easily become a liability rather than an asset, and when that happens,
you are powerless as a user.

If you take a look at serious general-purpose programmers' editing
environments, the market is more or less Eclipse, Emacs, vi clones
(mostly vim).

Open Source and/or Free Software.  "general-purpose" "programmers'" are
the buzz phrases where an open community really pays off for a product.
"general-purpose" since it serves and is served back a larger variety of
applications than the original developers imagined and/or could hope to
care for, "programmers'" because those are in the situation to indeed
contribute back.

So we need to get LilyPond into the shape where an average programmer
caring about mongolic double flute music can do what is needed to let
LilyPond support it nicely without too many unexpected road blocks.

We're not there yet.  LilyPond is more a humongous blob of an
application rather than a music typesetting _platform_, like Emacs is an
easily extended editing platform.

-- 
David Kastrup