gitMusic - experimental hosting for versioning lilypond scores
From:
Bogdan Bivolaru
Subject:
gitMusic - experimental hosting for versioning lilypond scores
Date:
Tue, 1 Sep 2009 16:04:21 +0300
Hello,
I'm planning to build an experiment consisting of a project service for collaborative editing & versioning of music files. My objective is to engage more artists in the kind of collaborative work that happens between free/open source software contributors. After a long time when I was designing complex contributing models between artists and complex tools to help them do their work, I've decided to start with standard software repository tools (git, bazaar), gather some feedback and start from there.
Lilypond is a good start as a collaborative music sharing format because it's clean text and has a clear language grammar. Thus the lilypond's format is compatible with current software versioning tools, so interested project members don't have to reinvent the concept of versioning system to support binary music files.
As for the technical/legal details, the planned experiment is a hosted site is based on Gitorious.org software, licensed under AGPL v3. I chose Gitorious.org software over Launchpad.net since it seemed easier to install - please suggest other alternative software pieces. I would expect that most of the music will be under some libre license (free art license, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-SA-NC,...). Libre licensing of music would be available for everyone, while proprietary music licensing should only be available to paying customers.
One aspect that keeps me up at night is that after the experiment is finnished, this service must support itself (money-wise), so I'm considering for finnancial support: donnations, subscriptions for extra features (such as more space), partnerships.
Should you be intereseted in some early "alpha testing" of this service, please reply to this mail. I'm trying to figure out how many users this service will have, please suggest some numbers.