Re: Lilypond store?

[Chris Sawer]

Erik Sandberg wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 July 2006 15:09, Stewart Holmes wrote:
> > Yes. Harsh this may sound, but how much of the music on Mutopia would you
> > be satisfied to print out, and use yourself? From a quick browse through
> > various sections, I have to say that a large amount of the music on there
> > is fairly poorly engraved. My proposition is for much more strict quality
> > control... after all, nobody will pay money for music unless it looks
> > professional.
>
> I suggest that you start a discussion thread on mutopia's mailing lists: If 
> you have constructive ideas on how to create an archive of high-quality 
> public domain notes, then I would strongly recommend you to use your ideas to 
> improve mutopia; if that's not possible, use mutopia as a base for creating 
> such an archive (i.e., fork the mutopia project).

Hi,

I initially read this thread as a proposal for offering printed versions 
of scores for sale. However, on a re-read, I understand that you're 
proposing to offer downloads of PDF files instead.

The attraction of Mutopia for me was the creation of an "open source" 
archive of sheet music, that people can download for free, print out, 
photocopy, and distribute. Rather like Project Gutenberg, but for music.

If you want to create a rival archive offering pieces for download at a 
price, then you are of course free to go ahead. Speaking from the point 
of view of someone who's looked after Mutopia for the last seven years, 
I think cleaning up Mutopia pieces and organising them for printing 
would be a very time consuming task. Entering new pieces is of course 
even more time consuming.

From a legal point of view, you will have to be careful what pieces 
from Mutopia you use. Many are licensed under a CreativeCommons 
Attribution or Attribution-ShareAlike license. Neither restricts you 
from selling works based on the Mutopia version, but the latter insists 
that you release your versions under an identical license (a bit like 
the GPL).

My positive suggestion would be to create a new website offering high 
quality *printed* LilyPond-engraved music for sale based on Mutopia 
contributions, still licensed under "open source" licenses. We did some 
experiments with lulu.com a while ago, and the results were very 
promising, so that's one possibility. If we work with you on this, and 
improvements are fed back to Mutopia, then we'd be happy to have links 
from the relevant Mutopia music pages to your store (ie. "buy a printed 
copy of this music"). Of course, you can pick music from Mutopia which 
is already reasonably high quality and likely to be popular. If you're 
interested, please let me know.

I would personally be very disappointed if someone were to "fork" Mutopia.

Chris

--

Chris Sawer - address@hidden - Mutopia team leader
Free sheet music for all at:  http://www.MutopiaProject.org/