Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakel...@webdrake.net> writes: > Yes, the processes of contribution-based free software "break" in > different ways to the processes of commercial proprietary software -- > there are different risks and different benefits. But the fact is, > someone using Sibelius now does not have to worry about the product > being discontinued. Even if Avid decided to discontinue the product, > its userbase, brand value and commercial viability would mean that > someone would step in to buy it.
Uh, the original developers of Sibelius made Avid an offer for buying Sibelius back. The offer was turned down. The situation you are talking of is that of a complete discontinuation of every developer continuity: what "someone" would be buying would be a final dump, not a project in development. Even porting to a different platform will be difficult. Betting on Sibelius is nowhere like betting on Microsoft Office on Windows (which feels more like betting on a race track than on a horse since if it goes down, it will change how races are done). It's already a bouncing ball. > By contrast, I do worry about what happens to Lilypond if for example > you find yourself indisposed. I think we can all agree it would be a > severe blow. :-) It would be a blow for its progress but not for its existence. I fancy myself to believe that I make a difference regarding where the equilibrium between maintainability, usability, bit rot, user experience, releasability and a few other things lies (or rather where it gravitates quite slowly). Without me, the equilibrium would likely move differently. But hopefully we are nowhere near the state that me quitting would lead to an unstable situation. And I have been cited as a reason that scares off new developers, so it would appear the vacuum would be filled by such new developers stepping in, and it's to be hoped that they'd be interested enough in maintaining stability and usability that they'd take care not to go off the deep end. Let's not forget that Han-Wen and Jan are basically indisposed (though available for reference) for most purposes, and that would appear to have been quite a larger blow that LilyPond got over reasonably well. Not to mention that Graham left, and it's hard to estimate what the ultimate cost of that will be, particularly regarding community building and maintaining. A good technical lead can't make up for everything: that's another shift in the equilibrium that happened in the recent past. What I am saying is that LilyPond survived a lot, and it survived this with a reasonable amount of continuity. A _sale_ of a software without accompanying infrastructure is not the same. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user