promoting LilyPond (was: Supporting my work on LilyPond financially)

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi all,

a very important discussion!  A couple thoughts:

2013/12/1 Carl Peterson <address@hidden>:
> LP came out in the midst of other packages that already existed. As a
> result, it is fighting for marketshare in a relatively mature market.
> Granted, it is possible to overcome this hurdle, as Google Chrome seems to
> be doing in the Browser Wars, but it takes something special for that to
> happen. In the case of Firefox and Chrome, that something was IE's truly
> abysmal performance in the IE 6-8 years.

That's true.  What's more, web browser users are just consumers.  With
notation packages, they are creators:
- learning how to create takes days or weeks (while learning how to
consume takes minutes),
- creators have a lot of their content tied to a specific format.


2013/12/1 Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden>:
> Urs wrote:
>> Most people I tried to persuade simply said "this isn't my cup of tea,
>> I'm not a programmer”.
>
> THAT is the main problem right there — one we are likely never to overcome,
> as much as I hate to admit it.

Yup...  As i see it, 90% of people notating music will never want to
use LilyPond, and we cannot do much about it:
- they don't care about high quality (just want "good enough"),
- they want to do things the easiest way, and LilyPond will never
appear to be the easiest choice,
- etc.

Unfortunately, people who don't have money for Finale/Sibelius usually
pirate it (instead of using Free Software).  Also, some smaller
publishers i've talked with seem not to care much about quality
engraving, and big publishers have a lot of inertia and stick to tried
programs.

Still, something like 10% of people *could* be convinced to using
LilyPond.  Some of them (2-3% of notation software users?) would
actually prefer using Lily for some reason.  Let's not waste time
trying to convince the ones who cannot be convinced, and instead try
finding people who may actually like LilyPond, but don't know that
they could use it:

- people with no money AND strong etthics, who won't pirate software
(e.g. monks/other religious people that typeset religious music),
- public companies with little money, which cannot risk using pirated software,
- people who want to Do Things The Right Way (usually geeks) - these
usually won't be scared by text input at all,
- professional engravers that really want perfect results,
- other professionals who would benefit from very advanced workflows
(using version control).  This is what Urs was talking about and i
really think it would be a very good opportunity for LilyPond.
- people who still use Score - they do care about quality, they
shouldn't be scared by learning curve,
- organizations funded by governments (0 price should be a big
advantage to them, and gonvernments should be promoting open culture
anyway),
- people who don't use any notation yet - students.


2013/12/1 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>
>> Here are the problems I run into: (1) most musicians/composers/institutions
>> are already using something.
>
> So we need to catch them before they do.  Janek got a number of his
> choir colleagues to enter "Stabat Mater" (don't remember whose,
> Pergolesi?) into LilyPond.

It was Handel's Dixit Dominus
(http://lilypondblog.org/2013/06/crowd-engraving-whats-that-part-1/) -
very simple notation-wise.  But later we entered more complex pieces
as well.  Still, most of them were "geeky" people (physics PhD, a
couple programmers, math students).

The approach i used there (i mean "crowd-engraving") proved to be a
good one, but we'd have to make a lot things simpler to make this
really effective.  I mean, i was the only one who could combine the
parts into the full score - creating \score blocks (real-life \score
blocks, with all nuances and settings) is too difficult for beginners.


So, what should we do now?  I suggest to create some comparisons and
promotional materials, similar to what is already in our Essay, but
more diverse and in a more compact form.  I already have some stuff
like that which i could share and translate.  Who'd like to join this
effort?

Also, the currently published series of articles on the
lilypondblog.org aims to make a foundation for this effort (evangelize
about LilyPond).

best,
Janek