Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 08/08/12 12:21, martinwguy wrote:
> 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.

Finale was the original pioneer[*], but Sibelius made a great advance in 
usability, and also was (and is) superior in terms of beautiful engraving. 
Unfortunately that came at a cost in its own right -- I remember well that 
earlier versions of Sibelius were _very_ good at engraving conventional music, 
but if you wanted to step into more customized territory, it was not pleasant. 
Finale was (and probably still is) much better if you wanted to define custom 
notations.

But you're right, the main benefit of a tool like this is to minimize the gap 
between making a change and being able to see and hear the result.

[* Technically, SCORE is the music notation pioneer, and in some ways still sets 
the standard in terms of computer engraving quality.  Unfortunately it's not 
really kept up to date in terms of being available for modern operating systems. 
 It's also in many ways more a precursor of Lilypond given that its model was 
ASCII text data entry:
http://www.ccarh.org/courses/253/handout/scoreinput/
http://www.winscore.info/index.html

The Windows-oriented version seems to have been in Beta for a long time, and 
it's not really clear to me where it's going, although it does seem to still 
have a small but dedicated community.]


> 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.

But Avid's motivation was not the benefit of their users, or even the 
profitability of the business model.  Sibelius alone was a very profitable piece 
of software -- Norman Lebrecht cites a turnover of about $18 million, which 
surely translates into a very large profit margin.  The reason for cutting the 
development team was to try and divert more of that turnover to profit, to cover 
profit shortfalls from other areas of Avid's business.

If you're talking Sibelius alone, it would be very difficult to make a 
_business_ case for open-sourcing it, given how successful it was in terms of 
proprietary sales.  And if Avid is not willing to sell Sibelius back to the 
original owners, for money, how much less willing are they going to be to open 
source 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

I rather think that SCORE is the software that ought to consider an open source 
model.  It was the original pioneer, but has fallen by the wayside due to lack 
of maintenance.  The WinScore development seems to be rather stagnant, and in 
any case a modern graphical version would need to target a wider range of 
platforms and operating systems.

It's unlikely there's a lot of money in that software now, and open-sourcing it 
could be the shot in the arm that it needs to recapture a wider user community.