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Re: promoting LilyPond


From: Joseph Rushton Wakeling
Subject: Re: promoting LilyPond
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 12:41:12 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.1.1

On 04/12/13 11:18, David Kastrup wrote:
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.

Yes, I'm very familiar with those arguments, and in the general sense I strongly agree with them. It's just that in practice, based on experience, I find that the weight others will give to those arguments tend to vary a great deal based on context. So, if you're trying to promote your software solution to other people, you need to tailor the message with that in mind.

For example, the risk of your software ceasing to be maintained or developed is often (for good reason) not seen as a high risk by users of major proprietary software tools. The risk of a business decision being taken that undermines the software's usefulness is taken much more seriously, but even then that risk gets offset against costs of migration, and the perceived maintainability of alternatives. In that context having a corporate body to deal with is generally considered a major plus (and a volunteer community, often something of a negative) regardless of the licensing situation, because it generally attests to the economic sustainability of the software in question.

So I'm not disagreeing with you or the general free software philosophy, I'm just pointing out that -- like free-as-in-beer -- not all of these benefits are necessarily perceived as such by prospective users. And I think one particular point you raised fits that bill.

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.

Yes. Generally speaking whenever I consider some development idea in Lilypond, I quickly come up against the realization that the investment of time required just to work out how to _start_ doing it is extremely large, and doesn't bring with it a lot of transferable knowledge. So, it's difficult to justify putting that effort in compared to (say) providing an overview of what I want and offering a bounty.




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