Re: Hushing up Sibelius news?

[David Kastrup]

Adam Spiers <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 5:22 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Adam Spiers <address@hidden> writes:
>>> I just blogged about this:
>>>
>>> http://blog.adamspiers.org/2013/02/25/music-industry-learns-nothing-from-the-avid-sibelius-saga/
>>
>> Well, I see some fatally flawed assumptions here, riding on your notion
>> "both MuseScore and GNU LilyPond would serve as excellent starting
>> points for a world-class music notation product."
>>
>> Now I can't vouch for MuseScore, but GNU LilyPond is anything but a
>> "starting point" for software development.  It is large with an
>> elaborate and complex architecture.  And most particularly, an
>> architecture that is not the core expertise of the former Sibelius
>> development team.
>
> I don't follow your logic here at all.  Being large and complex
> doesn't rule it out from being a starting point.

"Listen, engineering team, we have assembled to design and build the
most successful family car ever.  We don't have to start from scratch: I
already secured a shipment of 10000 trucks we can use as a starting
point."

Being large is of advantage if the quality is consistent.  Being complex
is a legacy.  The LilyPond code base is not good in confining
complexity.

> There are plenty of prominent examples where fresh projects succeeded
> by inheriting a large and complex codebase.  Firefox is one, and
> LibreOffice another; here's a great talk I attended at FOSDEM
> demonstrating precisely this:
>
> http://video.fosdem.org/2013/maintracks/Janson/LibreOffice__cleaning_and_re_factoring_a_giant_code_base.webm
>
> Those code-bases make LilyPond's look about as complex as two lines of
> BASIC ;-)

You are confusing large and complex.

-- 
David Kastrup