Re: bounties

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> On 06/21/2010 01:46 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
>> You wish.  It is a problem when Lilypond is the best tool for the job
>> and/or the cheapest.
>
> 'Cheapest' is IMO nowhere near as relevant as many people think,
> especially when it relates to organizations like publishers or
> universities that have large budgets anyway.

Yes.  I got distracted into "user complaints".

> As for 'best tool for the job', what job are you referring to?  Are
> you sure it is the job that everyone else is trying to do?

Getting the music from your head to paper.

>> Well, by now everybody and his dog writes diatribes how Stallman and
>> the Free Software Foundation and free software are on the road to
>> total failure and need to make themselves indistinguishable from
>> those systems for which they provide alternatives.
>
> Not me.  I'm with Stallman in the struggle for software freedom, and
> find myself amazed by how often people misrepresent and misunderstand
> what he and the FSF are on about.

In particular since he is saying the same things now as 30 years ago.
It's just that GNU is harder to ignore nowadays.

> Note that I did list ideological/philosophical reasons as one of the
> principal ways to get the self-motivation to learn to use Lilypond.
> (It worked for me.)

Well, I hate doing serious work outside of Emacs.  Is that
ideological/philosophical?

> Yea, but right now we're not talking about a popularity contest.  It
> would be very nice if universities and publishers all enthusiastically
> took up the use of Lilypond, but what we're talking about now is
> something much simpler -- raising money to dedicate to Lilypond
> development and project sustainability.

You'll be fine raising grant money as long as you make case studies of
typesetting and theses.  Once you move to general use, you'll need to
address "end users" (TM).

>> One way of evading the question is to make a compellingly good user
>> interface on Emacs (which then runs everywhere), but that's not
>> exactly a small task to do.  And there are people who would balk at
>> "compellingly good" in the same sentence with "Emacs".
>
> Despite the power of Emacs it doesn't make sense to me to use it as
> the dedicated platform.  Most users of Lilypond, especially beginners,
> don't need the possibilities it offers, and it's difficult to 'get'
> Emacs if you do not have a need for more than simple text editing.

That's the task of "compellingly good".  If it integrates smoothly
enough, with its own smooth major mode, consistent key bindings, and
breathtaking functionality, you need not mention that the underlying
platform is named "Emacs".  No, we are not there.  And no, I don't have
a road map to there.

> If I were aiming for an effective cross-platform editing environment
> for Lilypond, I would go for Frescobaldi as the leading candidate --
> it has a nice, friendly interface, good functionality, and Qt/KDE
> based tools make for good long term candidates for cross-platform
> applications.

You'll lose the GNOME users.  But maybe just those that would scorn a
GUI anyway.

But that's the whole thing: you won't be able to sell Lilypond to
universities.  But you might be able to sell Frescobaldi or something
like it, and people will not ask just what it uses internally.

Problem is that Frescobaldi's way more limited than Lilypond, and likely
has its own file formats, meaning that you can't exchange work with
"real" Lilypond users.  [Looking at its website].  Ok, I'm wrong about
that.  But that means that it exposes the user to "programming".  Namely
Lilypond.  I was imagining it to be something like LyX
<URL:http://www.lyx.org> in relation to LaTeX.

-- 
David Kastrup