Hi, I was thinking about fund raising for some days now. I see several possible sources for supporting LP financially:
1) Private donations from developers: This seems to be partly the case and you have my deep respect that you both work for and spend money on LP. This group probably stays relatively small. 2) Private donations from hobby users: Probably most users are not paid for their music engraving. If LP would not exist (nor some other free (as in free beer) software), they might have to pay for Finale (600$) or Sibelius (550€). But probably they would go with a light version of these programs (50$ - 120€). Just to have an idea what would be to spend otherwise (without LP). I write this to both sides: Spending about 100€ in 2 years is quite a lot if you use LP just for fun, not spending anything is quite cheap for such a great program. Here I would really encourage people using LP to think about this and help financially with a realistic amount of money, because there is need for it. Even if it is not much, the sheer number of users can contribute significantly. 3) Private donations from professionals: If professionals could be convinced that spending the money on LP development rather than on commercial products is beneficial also for them that would be great. How? Does someone have a closer relation to this occupational group than I do and has any ideas how to promote LP? 4) Donations/payments from institutions: I can not guess the user base, but I assume that institutional support is needed for sustainability and long term support. So far I have only heard about musicians in the LP community who are very tech-savvy and/or use linux anyway. Somehow the benefits of LP should be made clearer for music/composing professors the fact that many things can be made doable which are not up to now with any program. If his/her chair is supporting LP, this program could be a showpiece project (high quality engraving, open and free software, international project, huge amount of work already done and therefore a lot to show at low cost). Students in a paid assistant job could work on LP, this particularly in the computer science departments. Universities should be a place where new ways are chosen and new ideas pushed forward. And music teachers/schools could support it as licences for engraving software are mostly unaffordable for schools, but if everything is set up, pupils can write { a4 g f } and learn a program that everyone can use at home. So schools could teach this and offer a free software and support LP also financially. For music teachers OOoLy is so convenient to produce worksheets. So, in my opinion, universities and schools should be convinced of LP, because 100€ for a single person is quite something, but a remarkably good project which can bring some good publicity could be worth much more for such institutions. I personally don't understand why LP is not common at music universities but that's probably a chicken-or-the-egg thing and the lack of large scale marketing. But this would also need official contacts in the LP team who are responsible and can represent LP towards these institutions. tl;dr My summary: LP would need either a large user base with small donations (like wikipedia partly) or institutions behind it (I'm thinking about the Document Foundation or Linux, in this case more about universities). Cheers, Joram _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user