On 9 Mar 2005 at 10:28, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > If a product made use of an authentication scheme such as that used by > MakeMusic!, and failed to provide public maps of the formats of data > files inhibiting or preventing development of other packages which > might read and write data files of that same format thus making it > difficult or was impossible for a user to access the data in a file > without that product any other product, whether provided by the vendor > of the original or not. > > Since MakeMusic! provides publicly the structure of the data files > created with Finale, and also provides a free package that will read > and print those files, I submit that Finale is most emphatically not > victimware.
And what if nobody invests the time to write a program to edit the data files? And what if somebody *does* invest the time? You think the complaints about Finale are legion! Hah! You make an absolutely ridiculous argument, one that gives up all rights to the owner of the software code. If there were already programs that can read and write Finale files, it would be one thing. For example, current versions of MS Word are also authenticated, but you have plenty of non-Microsoft word processers that can read and edit Word files. So, I'm not too worried about losing Word data (of course, I use Word97, which is *not* authenticated, so I have even less to worry about). But with Finale, there really isn't anything out there that gives you any *reasonable* facsimile of reading/editing Finale files. Dolet's MusicXML converter is a great thing, but it's a long distance from perfection in converting. All authenticated products (not just Finale) should have an escrowed master key in order to insure that you are not tying your data investment to the fortunes of a company that may fail next week. And, no, I haven't purchased any authenticated version of Finale and don't intend to do so. I see nothing compelling about either version in comparison to WinFin2K3 to make me regret the fact of authentication (which prevents me on principle from purchasing the software). -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
