Re: Do we really offer the future?

[Urs Liska]

Am 17.04.2015 um 16:05 schrieb Kieren MacMillan:
> Hi Urs,
>
> First off, thank you so much for your continuing efforts on behalf of Lilypond. 
> They are really important, and no doubt time- and energy-consuming for you, 
> with little promise of immediate benefit to you personally. The ‘Pond 
> appreciates you!
>
> > "why should a publishing house use LilyPond?”
> We might start by asking the question “Why should *any* person use Lilypond?”, 
> and then scale up from there.

Well, this seems a good idea, but not for my original question. I think, 
this is to some extent what I already have, but the different question 
here is "why should anybody who already has existing workflows and 
infrastructure *switch* to LilyPond?"

If you could find the time to put together a list of arguments (or maybe 
a nice blog post) why a *composer* should use LilyPond this would also 
be very helpful. I have had discussions with various composers whom I 
couldn't really convince of the usefulness of giving it a try.
For this kind of people it seems most important to get their music into 
the score as quickly and easily as possible. I'm thinking of composers 
who *do* need performance material but who do not necessarily need 
publication quality, just the one necessary for people to play from the 
material.

> ...
>
> > most publishing houses don't really care anymore about the editorial process, 
> > and they have the impression that this could actually create more overhead than 
> > they have currently
> We might want to tailor a few “pitches” — complete with working demonstrations 
> — to present to organizations with different needs. For example, a 
> quick-and-dirty translation which (e.g.) took a Finale source filie and turned 
> it [first via MusicXML, probably] into a Henle-lookalike Lilypond file in under 
> 5 minutes would be VERY compelling to certain people, and they wouldn’t want to 
> see (or even care about) edition management, ScholarLY, etc. Then a second 
> (likely longer) demo would be available for those working on critical editions. 
> And so on.

Sounds reasonable.
I think I've identified (or was told) the following use cases:

- producing scores "for the day" - editions without specialized demands 
and not necessarily intended for extra-long maintainment.
- producing scores on short notice, e.g. performance material when the 
composer delivers too late
- process existing material (either from the archives or from 
heterogenous contributors' systems)
- scholarly editions and edition series with a long-term horizon.

Urs