> Well, this *something* seems easy to pin down: too few developers. So at > any given moment it is difficult to find someone who has the ability, > the interest, and spare time at the same moment.
... Could we expect to be paid for it?
I don't expect to be paid for open-source work. In fact, doing it for the love of it is part of the reason, when I've contributed to things in the past. I'd love to contribute to Lilypond, but I suspect much of the work needs to be in Lisp -- quite the learning curve (and unless I'm wrong, very likely a blocker to getting more collaboration).
I was really quite shocked to read of David's situation and very surprised that someone thinks they can reasonably make a living off developing an open source tool such as this. I must of course say that's not without complete respect for his past and continuing work on the project.
I use Lilypond because it's free, like free speech. This is open source software! If I were using Lilypond commercially this would be a different situation; but if I was writing music commercially I would probably, either by force of collaboration with publishers or by choice, have already purchased a popular commercial software package beginning with S.
However .... whilst I felt a bit guilt-tripped by the original post, I have easily had enough use out of it to donate some cash to someone in order to support Lilypond.
I suggest David, or one of the other project owners set up a Paypal account that we can easily fire money off to from anywhere in the world, anonymously.