Hi Johan, > Why should serious businesses use Unix? > Outcome: they didn’t.
Actually, they do, on quite a large scale: UNIX and UNIX-like servers have a ~68% market share for public servers. And the share of internal (corporate) servers is not insignificant (though not nearly 2/3, of course). > Why should serious businesses use LaTeX instead of MSO? > Outcome: they didn’t. Depends entirely on which “serious business” you’re talking about. I’m about to have my sixth number theory paper published by the American Mathematical Monthly, a “serious business” if there ever was one; they, of course, required the submission in LaTeX, like all reputable journals. My point is, such [ultimately rhetorical] questions only make sense in a correct and fairly narrowly-defined context. > Why should serious businesses use Linux instead of Windows? > Outcome: they didn’t. Here I fully agree with you… and this is the [analogous] battleground where Lilypond’s make-or-break battles will be won or lost. > For us, command line driven programming may feel normal I am completely comfortable with command-line programming. But I *never* use it with Lilypond: I only use tools (e.g., Frescobaldi, or even the Mac OS X built-in “Lilypad editor") which abstracts all of that for me. > it will never become broadly accepted Totally true, of course — and not necessarily a bad thing. Our willingness to accept that and give [potential] users what they need to get around without the command-line will almost single-handedely determine the degree to which Lilypond successfully penetrates the wider market. > I did some book productions for a big publisher. I convinced them that I > would be delivering high-quality camera-ready materials. They didn't care > how I did it, what tools I used, even though my results looked better than > theirs. Unfortunately, that just isn’t the way with music publishers: they almost universally demand the “source code” (by which they mean Finale or Sibelius music file), which they then manipulate as they deem necessary. > Bottom line: Let's have fun the way *we* do it. Let's show the world the > beautiful scores we make. If people wants to join us, let's welcome them > and guide them patiently through the learning curve. And enjoy. To my mind, a better bottom line would be to flatten the learning curve significantly for [potential] new users without reducing Lily's power, flexibility, and beautiful output. Cheers, Kieren. ________________________________ Kieren MacMillan, composer ‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info ‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
