On 06/19/2010 07:50 PM, Valentin Villenave wrote: > Ditto here. I have contacted dozens of French universities, music > schools, government-funded music structures and whatnot. Everytime I > got an answer, the answer was: "Fuck off, we already have Finale". > > Or something like that.
What were the nature of the proposals or enquiries you made? I'm asking because of my own experience, now, working for an organization where the leadership is quite traditional-business-oriented, and trying to steer their thinking in more open ways. What's clear is that their attitude is very much along the lines of, 'There are lots of different models/tools you could adopt, but these ones have clear and proven track record of success. So you have to prove to us that your alternative is viable and sustainable.' Returning to the music institutions, Finale/Sibelius work for them, _and the issue is not the money_, even on a student level. Music students will pay tens of thousands of euros for instruments -- €500 for a software licence, and €100 a year for an upgrade (if you really want to) is a piss in the park by comparison. The issue is also not the freedom, because it's not such a big deal in most cases to be able to read past files or hack the software. Once you've got a PDF of a composition your work is done, and it's common for music to be re-engraved from scratch. It's not even the beauty of results, because -- we see this on a regular basis -- the Finale- or Sibelius-produced editions are _good enough for purpose_. With publishers at least, the norm seems to be to use the music engraving software to produce the basic framework and then further edit the output postscript in some vector graphics tool where necessary. It really is about producing final graphical output. They won't even care if Lilypond offers them something they don't get from Finale/Sibelius, because -- well -- you guys are doing this anyway and give it away for free. :-P What they _will_ care about is if you can give them a concrete plan along the lines of, 'This is something that you care about that you don't have now, or don't have easily, and here is how we can provide it, and this is how much money it will cost.' You have to make it very clear to them, because although the people concerned may be very nice and talented and able in the general scheme of things, where software is concerned they generally have the level of understanding of the pointy-haired boss. Or else they have a pointy-haired technology boss to tell them what to think. :-) (Mind you: that's European and US colleges. I'd be curious to see if you might have more luck going to South American or Asian or African institutions, who might appreciate the budgetary implications of being able to secure a long-term reliably supported notation solution for a fraction of the cost of Finale/Sibelius licenses. To say nothing of the fact that it fits with the more communally-inclined cultural innovations that are taking place in these countries. Try taking the message to Brazil with their increasing enthusiasm for copyleft [Gilberto Gil as culture minister], try taking it to Venezuela with reference to Il Sistiema, try wedding it to projects built on top of the 'One Laptop Per Child' scheme.) Examples of things that could get people's attention: -- Lilypond as a tool for disabled (notably, blind) access to music notation software. Not just blind music students like our own Hui Haipeng -- as a tool for disabled outreach projects. You'd have to take account of the fact that while Finale and Sibelius aren't so helpful to a blind person from a visual point of view, they DO offer valuable support in their ease of entering music by playing on the keyboard. -- Lilypond as a tool for 3rd-world or poor country outreach, prison outreach (it happens!), educational outreach to deprived regions of their own country. -- Support for community outreach projects (bearing in mind that music students and even schools can probably deal with the costs of software licenses, but it lowers the point of entry and long- term sustainability of wider community participation; think of the way that community and church choirs already use Lilypond...) -- Support for niche notational needs not well supported by Finale or Sibelius, such as early music or extreme contemporary music, algorithmically-created music, etc. -- Support for non-Western musics. Bear in mind that one GREAT way to unlock the coffers of institutions is to provide them with something where, by spending this money, they can do something that makes them look good in terms of the public arts spending aims of the day. :-) Example of these priorities in terms of questions a friend of mine was asked to address when applying to have her work displayed in a music technology exhibition: 'How can new technology build local communities, create new identities, new narratives, new forms of public interaction? How can creative projects foster cultural development?' You can see that this has little to do with the aesthetic value of a work, but a _lot_ to do with the current political narratives of trying to overcome 'cultural clashes' and build 'inclusiveness'. Hence some of the suggestions above -- it's something that, described in the right way, Lilypond could fit in well with ... Last, I would try a more fine-grained approach, not going to the institutions on an 'institutional level' but seeking out e.g. the leaders of particular projects that have particular needs that aren't quite being met right now. Be pro-active in seeking out niche needs of people who have (even small) budgets to spend, and connecting those people where their needs overlap -- if you can charge a relatively small fee of €500 per group involved in return for providing for their need, and you have 10 projects with that niche need ... I'm sure you will tell me that you have done at least some and maybe all of the above. Maybe one useful exercise could be to try and document in detail those efforts to see if there are reasons that can be identified for their failure. Best wishes, -- Joe _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel