Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[martinwguy]

On 7 August 2012 01:59, Neil Thornock <address@hidden> wrote:
> Sibelius was good for us. Many of my students came to music because of
> software like Sibelius. A precious few came to LilyPond because of the
> music.

That's a very good point. The learning curve of Lilypond is steep,
whereas poking at note positions on a visible stave lowers the bar
immensely. In this respect Sibelius has done a great service to the
world of music by providing a working example of such a tool long
before the open-source world caught up with musescore.

However, it comes at a cost, which Sibelius users are now paying:
dependence on a commercial entity for the integrity of the tools you
use. In that respect, Sibelius, like Word, is a trap.

> I think we ought to be fighting to save Sibelius as much as anything.

The ideal solution for Sibelius *users* would be for Avid to
open-source their product: to stop being Netscape and start being
Mozilla Foundation, which has a far more solid business model than
Netscape ever did, but that requires a change of vision at the top
level of Avid, as well as the mental flexibility to understand and
harness the open source model effectively as well as a way to monetize
it.

In Netscape's case, the snowball that started the avalanche was Frank
Hecker's internal report "Netscape's Source Code as Netscape's
Product", currently available in an updated form as "Setting Up Shop:
The Business of Open-Source Software" at
http://hecker.org/writings/setting-up-shop

Sacking the key Sibelius software developers who have spent years
gaining an understanding of how it works, and outsourcing its
maintenance to the cheapest offer seems like a valid economic decision
- or it would be if programmers could be swapped and changed like the
spare parts in a car. In reality giving the maintenance of a complex
program to those who do not know it is a recipe for a software
disaster and corporate suicide. If they do that, Sibelius users would
be wise to keep a copy of the last Sibelius installer file that was
released by the last team of developers.

    M