Re: Do we really offer the future?

[Gilles]

Hello.

On Sun, 19 Apr 2015 21:39:29 -0400, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> Hi Gilles (et al.),
>
> > To whom LilyPond should strive to "offer the future”?
>
> To everyone it possibly can.  ;)

Yes, but we are all aware of the limited resources, and I doubt that
focusing on how to please established editing houses will lead us
closer to the principles and goals of free software.

> > IMHO, certainly not to the "[...] big house[s] with traditions,
> > regulations and limitations”.
>
> Why not? What’s to say that Lilypond can’t initially fit within those
> traditions, regulations, and limitations, while providing benefits
> (financial and otherwise) to those “big houses”, and can’t eventually
> help a “big house” move past those limitations while maintaining
> whatever traditions and regulations they see as indispensible?

Your question is quite fair.
But why do you ask _me_? ;-)
I'd answer that, yes, they can and should use LilyPond, if they care
for their business' future.
The point is that _they_ don't understand, and that bright people
here will (probably) waste their time trying to figure out their
business case for them.

Some software projects try to please their users, sometimes through
decisions that could hurt long-term improvements.
Even worse is giving the priority to non-users!

> > What's for the LilyPond team in spending resources trying to work 
> > around
> > those self-inflicted limitations?
>
> Let’s say, for discussion’s sake, we convince a Warner-Chappell,
> Boosey & Hawkes, or Barenreiter to use Lilypond as their primary
> engraving application. You honestly don’t see the potential upsides 
> of
> that situation?

Sure, I could imagine them.
I could parallel the comparison with big companies starting to pay
programmers for contributing to the development of Linux.
But, actually, the situation is upside down: the Linux team did not try
to please e.g. IBM; rather, IBM figured out what their best interest 
was.

Publishers would be expected to give back if (when) they benefit
financially from using LilyPond.  The discussion here is that LilyPond
should give even more to them, right now.

> Do you not remember the tipping point when OpenOffice
> was embraced over Microsoft Office as the official office application
> suite by certain governments?

Again, this is different in a very significant aspect: the citizen 
benefit
(in principle at least) when public institutions become independent of
private interests (by adopting FLOSS).
In this case, we consider FLOSS being adopted by a private company. I'm
sure the company can benefit; I'm not sure that the public will.

> > LilyPond is "[...] a program that creates beautiful sheet music 
> > following
> > the best traditions of classical music engraving." (excerpt from
> > "http://www.lilypond.org/introduction.html";)
> >
> > I think that this goal is way more important (to users)
> > than trying to convince publishers.
>
> To certain users? Absolutely.
> To a majority of users? Possibly.
> To all users? Doubtful.

If one goal of LilyPond was to immediately grab all users of the 
existing
alternatives, it should have renounced to implement its way of 
inputting
contents...
It's good (for the goal of creating beautiful scores automatically) 
that
the chosen approach was different.  With the difference came 
incomprehension
of most people who are generally averse to change, whatever the number 
of
rational arguments you can throw at them.

> In any case, those aren't mutually exclusive goals. Quite the
> contrary: almost tautologically, the easier it is for an abstract 
> user
> to “create beautiful sheet music following the best traditions of
> classical music engraving”, the easier it will be to convince a given
> publisher to become a user.

I agree with the rationality of the argument: the reality is different
(cf. previous paragraph), unfortunately.

> > A project like Mutopia is a promising future
>
> I disagree rather strongly. Mutopia (at least currently) appears to
> me to be a rather damning example of the failure of the open-source
> philosophy to be able to make a broad and lasting impact on its
> intended market. Worse, far too many of the examples there are not, 
> to
> my eye, “beautiful sheet music following the best traditions of
> classical music engraving”; I would, for example, never send someone
> there if I was trying to impress them with Lilypond’s engraving
> output.

I meant the _idea_ of "Mutopia": a repository of free sheet music.
One can rightly be disappointed that the quality of the contents does
not evolve in step with LilyPond.
Can it be blamed on LilyPond's shortcomings?

I'd like to know what people think it would take to make the endeavour
really take off.  I possible, I'd rather use resources for that 
project.

> > If and when "big" publishers use LilyPond, the result will be more
> > restricted access (through cost)
>
> Cost of what? Lilypond wouldn’t ever cost any more.

I didn't mean LilyPond; I meant that rather than accumulating scores
forever free (as should be the case if encoding them was done thanks
to public funding), we'll continue in the same system where musicians
continue to pay for works long gone out of copyright.

> > to culture (because they won't release
> > their proprietary contents)
>
> Nor would we necessarily want them to.

Not necessarily.
But for a lot of people creating and using free software, that's one
of the worthy goals.

> > I've thought for a long time that the right way to go is to seek
> > public funds for engraving public domain contents with the purpose
> > of publishing it under a GPL-like (or Creative Commons) license.
>
> That’s a fine goal… but shouldn’t in any way distract the Lilypond
> community from more important goals which would more immediately and
> significantly benefit the ‘Pond (and beyond). IMHO, one of those more
> important goals would be making a major inroad into the rather small
> walled city that is the commercial music publishing world.

IMHO, finding ways to create contents without being dependent on big
companies is more important than pleasing those companies.  YMMV.


Best regards,
Gilles

> Cheers,
> Kieren.