On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 10:50:43PM +0000, Geoff Chirgwin wrote: > Since our first implementation is in HTML5, we needed a > lightweight way to render music notation to the HTML5 canvas > entirely client-side in the browser. Since we know of no > existing software that does this, we've started writing our own. > We're calling it Rastral.
This is probably going to be an order of magnitude more work than you think it will, unless you have a very strict feature set in mind. For example, if you only want to deal with pitches, durations without tuplets, articulations, and slurs without caring about collisions, then I think it would work. If you want to do much more than this, I wouldn't be surprised if Rastral ended up being more work than the handwriting recognition part. > There are two immediate questions about licensing (which may spark more): > 1) Is it permissible to embed the Feta font in a web page and/or redistribute > it? > 2) Is it permissible to embed fetaList.cxx in a web page and/or redistribute > it? (we're using this for the font name to code point mappings, and, believe > it > or not, it interprets verbatim as Javascript) > > We're assuming we'll GPL Rastral. Don't just assume this -- decide on it right now. - if you put Rastral under GPLv3, then there are no problems using portions of LilyPond. However, if you (or your university) wants to commercialize your work, there might be problems with GPLv3 software. - if you put Rastral under GPLv2, you can only use feta stuff from a few months ago; the later material is under GPLv3. This could give you more leeway with "web apps" if the rendering is done server-side. Since you've explicitly mentioned client-side rendering, though, this point is moot. The same problems with potential commercializations apply. - if Rastral is not going to be GPL'd, then you certainly cannot use fetaList.cxx, and off the top of my head I doubt that you could use Feta either. (I don't claim to be certain about the latter point) > We're not expert in software licensing, but we're hoping to > release this software in the spirit of open source, in such a > way that the Lilypond developers approve and that the community > as a whole may benefit. Any input on this is appreciated. I would recommend GPLv3, then -- but make sure that your collaborators agree to this as well, before progressing too much further in this project. On a personal note, I'm a PhD student in the Center for Music Technology at the University of Glasgow, and I'm quite interested in this work -- both as a user, but also as a potential developer. I'm currently generating notation for musician listening experiments using flash, but this is a quite unsatisfactory state of affairs, both from a licensing/openness standpoint, but also from an ease-of-development standpoint. Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
