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Re: Hushing up Sibelius news?


From: Joseph Rushton Wakeling
Subject: Re: Hushing up Sibelius news?
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 19:13:52 +0100
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On 02/28/2013 06:20 PM, Adam Spiers wrote:
I strongly disagree, unless your definition of "difficult" ignores
the time dimension of such a project.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

It can go horribly wrong, yes, but it doesn't have to. Git for example was a from-scratch attempt at DVCS -- if Linus Torvalds had started from e.g. Arch or Darcs, it's unlikely that we'd have had the innovative DVCS that we see today.

Know-how and experience do not enable large, functional code-bases to
be magically constructed in short time spans.  They help increase
velocity and quality, but any new code-base takes a long time to grow.

Yes, but it takes even longer if you begin from the wrong starting point. Neither Lilypond nor MuseScore really does what this team seem to be aiming for -- there would be such a level of redesigning that you might as well start from scratch.

but because they are writing a completely new codebase, they do
not have to be constrained by historical mistakes or backwards
compatibility.

Nor would they be constrained by these if they started with LilyPond.

Lilypond's existing architecture is a constraint, its existing syntax is another constraint. And much as I admire Lilypond, I doubt its design is entirely free of mistakes ... ;-)

Finally we can agree on something ;-)  But Daniel Spreadbury already
admitted that they haven't even looked at the LilyPond and MuseScore
code, therefore they have dismissed the possibility even before doing
a technical feasibility study.

Well, of course not. They won't want to risk the possibility of GPL'd code influencing what they write. The simplest legal defence against accusations of copying is, "I've never looked at that code."

But the bottom line is, their licensing choices and their reasons for building a project from scratch are fairly orthogonal. The opportunity to use someone else's code is advantageous if someone else's code provides functionality you need or that fits well into your architectural concept.

Personally, I doubt that Lilypond's design choices fit well with a piece of software that's designed to provide real-time WYSIWYG engraving, and MuseScore's data structures are likely to be far too limited compared to what the former Sibelius team are setting out to do.

It's a shame that the opportunity to do so was taken away from them by a firm corporate decision to build a proprietary project, but I suspect that even with firm backing for a free software package, they'd have chosen to start from the ground up.



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