Re: [SPAM] Re: Serious feedback and improvement headroom

[David Kastrup]

"Phil Holmes" <address@hidden> writes:

> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: Jan Warchoł
> To: David Kastrup ; Mike Solomon ; Kieren MacMillan ; Han-Wen Nienhuys
> Cc: LilyPond Development Team
> Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 9:23 PM
> Subject: Re: [SPAM] Re: Serious feedback and improvement headroom
>
>> Look at what happened with Browser Wars: in the first half of 2000s,
>> Firefox was obviously a
>> better browser than IE by orders of magnitude, and nevertheless its
>> adoption was slow.
>> Then, when Google Chrome appeared, it had won the first place almost
>> overnight.
>
> You may like to know that here are more Firefox users accessing the
> LilyPond website than Chrome.
>
>> Do you see my point?
>
> No, I'm sorry, I don't.  I don't think LilyPond is in competition with
> any commercial product: it offers a free alternative.  I started using
> LilyPond because I didn't want to pay £100s for something that was not
> fundamental to my life: LilyPond offered something that did
> essentially the same thing for nothing.  To me, there is no
> competition: that only occurs when products are fighting for the same
> market, and LilyPond is in a different market: i.e. free software.

Well, it's also in the market for dinosaur tools, namely text-based
batch processing tools.  There were proprietary competitors in that
market segment previously (SCORE and Amadeus both seem to fit that
bill), but as the market of new users looks for other solutions, vendors
tend to close shop.  That cannot happen with Free Software, so LilyPond
is a good pick for people with an attention span longer than the average
popular software lifetime.  And LilyPond is free to tinker with.

Most of the people on this list have invested time and effort and partly
also money in amounts that would dwarf the costs of most proprietary
software copies.  But always at their own discretion.

-- 
David Kastrup