Hi Mark and David, >>About a month ago, they acquired Recordare and the MusicXML technology, >> and made the Dolet plug-ins free for everyone. > >Whoa, I missed that news. > >Congratulations, Michael. (Or at least I think it's congratulations. >This is a good thing, right?)
Thanks, Mark! Yes, this a very good thing indeed. The next step in what I want to do in digital sheet music required a bigger company than Recordare. MakeMusic is the world's largest company focused on music notation, practice, and digital sheet music technology. With its energetic new management, it was clearly the best fit for me. It sounds like Gary feels a similar way about his company and what he wants to do next. There's more information about the Recordare asset acquisition at: <http://www.recordare.com/company/about-us/more-about-makemusic-acquisition > >What's to prevent some future >CEO (and MakeMusic has had quite a few over the years I've been using >Finale) from clamping down and either refusing to renew the agreements >with the other developers or simply raising the licensing fees so high >that other developers decide not to keep including MusicXML capability. David, the current MusicXML license prevents this. MusicXML 3.0 is available under a non-revocable royalty-free license. Nobody pays a license fee to use MusicXML. If someone in the future decided to change the license and charge license fees, that would have to be with MusicXML 4.0, not MusicXML 3.0. If somebody did that, I doubt anybody would use it. Everyone would stay with MusicXML 3.0, and improvements would be forked from that based on the MusicXML 3.0 license. Developers were really concerned about MusicXML licensing when Recordare was a start-up with uncertain prospects. The license agreement was carefully designed to meet the needs of both commercial and open-source software, as well as to address succession concerns. I think it has served us well in this transition. Best regards, Michael Good Director of Digital Sheet Music MakeMusic, Inc. PO Box 3654 Los Altos, CA 94024 USA _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
