this is an entirely unfair judgement of free or open source software
(FOSS). there is no written or unwritten law that states that FOSS
has to invent new objects (or ideas). in lilypond's case the "goal"
would seem to be to offer the user an alternate working space /
method to the established commercial software "giants" finale and
sibelius, for notating music of the past (so far no real commitment
to new music on their part), based on established notational
principles. the "objects" lilypond (in this case) is used to produce
are common to all notation programmes: a decent reproduction of an
existing or newly created score.
how well any of these software in fact do respond to the needs or the
underlying political differences of commercial and FOSS is an
entirely different discussion.
FOSS offers the possibility of an extremely short turnaround in
fixing bugs and implementing new or better features truly based on
users' needs than pretty much any available commercial software. and
i am not saying this always happens, eudora is a prime example of
FOSS gone wrong. or perhaps on vacation...
This is one of the issues with open source software projects that
you see all the time -- they don't have new ideas of their own, they
are copying from or reacting to the implementations in the past.
This means that in many cases, the open source project retains
structural mistakes in thinking inherent in the models they use (or
anti-models, if you will).
When you choose a model instead of rethinking the problem from
scratch, you end up with problems of imperfect modelling -- e.g.,
the copy is worse than the original because, even though it
rectifies some of the problems in the original, it fails to
implement many of the aspects that the persons doing the copying
failed to notice.
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