>>>>> "Bob" == Bob van der Poel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Bob> I actually did try an early version of lilypond. Frankly, it
Bob> just didn't work....
well, as jan says, the webpage is plastered with email addresses, not
to mention the mailing list, to which you could write for help if you
had a problem. if mup had "not worked", would you have just deleted
it, or written to the author(s) with your problems? if you'd gone
through all the pieces of software you'd reviewed and none of them had
worked to your satisfaction and you didn't bother to talk with anyone
about it, you would have had a short review...
jeff> it's nice of you to add some more sample scores to your
jeff> website, but they're unfortunately useless to the community
jeff> since you've written them in a proprietary format that can
jeff> only be used by other people who have bought the same
jeff> program you use. it's like distributing useful texts on
jeff> your page in microsoft word format. they'd be so much more
jeff> useful if they were in a format that anyone could process
jeff> freely, like the lilypond scores i have at
Bob> I'm not sure why you think they are useless to the community.
ok, let me explain.
think for a moment of the gutenburg project
(http://www.gutenberg.net/). now, imagine that instead of making
their texts available as ascii, they were available in a format that
could only be read if you bought a proprietary reader. at least three
things would happen as a result. first, the number of people who
could access the texts would be radically restricted. as a result,
the number of people who would want to contribute to the project by
adding new texts would go down as well. lastly, it would become
difficult if not impossible to extend the project in new and useful
ways.
as an example of that last item, take my lilypond web interface. it
makes it possible for anyone on any platform to use lilypond to notate
scores. as a result, the number of people who can contribute music to
the community increases a millionfold, and it becomes possible for
people to easily edit existing scores to fit their needs, or to use
them to advance their own musical studies. if i had been using mup,
this would have been impossible, because it would have meant that i
was taking my single-license copy of mup and making it available to
universe, in violation of the license. the best that could be done
would be for the mup author(s) to create such a page, then password
protect it and charge people for accounts that would let them access
it, at which point the idea has been crippled to the point of being
virtually useless. because i was using lilypond, the reaction to the
page was simply, "great!", not "hey, you're sharing our software with
other people; no fair!!"
do you see what i'm saying now? making mudela files available gives
the internet community a set of scores it can use, modify, and
redistribute freely. if people don't have lilypond installed, they
can still edit and use them just by copying and pasting them into a
webpage. making mup files available gives the community something
they can use only if they buy the software that processes them.
lilypond mudela files are immediately useful to everyone; mup files
are useless to the vast majority. lilypond encourages the creation of
free music archives for everyone to enjoy and interact with. mup
forces people to keep their work within the limited mup community.
Bob> Are you suggesting that the only appropriate software to run
Bob> on a Linux system is free/opensource software?
no, i think people should feel free to use whatever software they
like, but i think they should be conscious of the implications of the
choices they make. they should realize that by distributing a flier
in ms word format when postscript is available or a textbook in a
proprietary hypertext language when html is available or making people
access data through a platform-limited c++ client when the same
information could just be presented on a webpage (see
http://pobox.com/~jeff.covey/mris.html), they're providing less of a
service to the community at large than they might think, and are
unnecessarily crippling the free flow of ideas. and i think that
someone writing for a gnu/linux publication should be aware of these
facts and be able to point them out to people.
in other words, i think you should be able to point out, "if you need
a full-featured music notation package today, you should buy a copy of
mup, but realize that this is what you're giving up as a
consequence..." then a note about how far lilypond has come and how
rapidly it's developing wouldn't hurt for those readers like me who
are willing to wait for the sake of keeping our freedom.
if you use a gnu/linux system, if your email gets sent by sendmail, if
your webpages get served by apache, if you get domain names from bind,
if you edit text on emacs, if you make images with gimp -- if you gain
advantage day after day from free software that other people have
given to you, it just seems to me terribly ungrateful to write for a
gnu/linux publication and claim to list all of the music notation
programs at which you've looked but purposefully leave out the gnu
music project itself.
--
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| jeff covey [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pobox.com/~jeff.covey/ 410-669-4926 |
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| so which shall it be, the luminous rabbit or the giant squirt? |
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