On 9 Mar 2005 at 11:20, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > d. collins wrote: > > > In other words, you accept the fact that six months from now, or six > > years, or any time, you might no longer be able to use the copy of > > Finale you purchased > > The real issue is not whether or not one can continue to use Finale; > it is whether one can access the information in a given set of Finale > files. . . .
At a bare minimum, the legalistic minimum, yes. But as a practical matter, that's a rather libertarian point of view, kind of the "I can't afford health care" to which the libertarian replies "be rich!" > . . . Neither the survival of Finale, nor the creation of an > Escrowed untether is the critical step in the process here, in my > opinion. . . . Yes, it really *is* critical step. This list exists because of problems people have editing native Finale data with Finale itself. How much greater and more problematic would editing that data be *without* Finale? > . . . The truly critical element here is for each user to make > certain that every data file considered critical are stored in an > accessible format. To that end, I'd submit that ~.mus files are not > as good a choice for long term archival purposes as ~.etf files. . . . Assuming you're going to reverse engineer the data structure, yes, of course. But the whole point of the key escrow is that IT OBVIATES THE NEED TO RE-ENGINEER. How anyone could not think that would be preferable to the mere hope (fantasy?) of reverse engineering the file format, I can't imagine. > . . . And > just from a practical standpoint, I'd guess that for each and every > user, the likelihood of losing accessiblity to data files as a result > of natural catastrophe, operator error, or of hardware, or of media > failure is orders of magnitude higher than the likelihood of the > failure of MakeMusic! . . . But that kind of data loss happens only to individuals, whereas the failure of MakeMusic locks up the data of everyone who has purchased the authenticated versions of Finale. > . . . So instead of demanding a escrow scheme, it > seems to me that a prudent user is going to have redundant copies of > all data files, and software in diverse locations. In my case, I have > three copies of my critical ~.ETF files, in widely separated > locations, and the archived old version distribution disks also > distributed among those locations. The cost to MakeMusic of key escrow is very low relative to the cost incurred by users of Finale should MM fail in the absence of key escrow. There is no logical explanation for their failure to provide insurance to their users. -- 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
