lilypond-web: Freedom
Freedom
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Free Software
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GNU (http://www.gnu.org/) LilyPond is written and maintained by a
community of enthusiasts. It is published under the 
GNU General
Public License GPL. and the GNU Free Documentation License FDL,
giving everybody the freedom to fix, modify, and extend the program.
Creating beautiful music should not require hundreds of dollars of
software!
What are the benefits to users?
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• No cost: download and try it out! What do you have to lose?
• Sharing: if you like the program, give a copy to your friends,
teachers, students, and colleagues!
• Source available: if you are curious about how LilyPond creates
some notation, you can see exactly how it is done.
• Extendible: you can add features, fix bugs, and change the
functionality. If you are not a programmer, you can hire somebody
to do those tasks.
This may not seem appealing to casual musicians, but the ability to
extend software can be highly valuable to serious composers,
companies, and academics.
• Future safety: if a commercial company goes bankrupt, what happens
to any electronic music which depends on their products? This is
not a concern with LilyPond; even if the entire development team
quits (extremely unlikely), the program will still be legally
available for copying, modifications, and distribution.
Why do LilyPond developers “give away” their work for free?
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Most of us view LilyPond development as a hobby or volunteer work. So
this question is really asking “why do people volunteer”?
• Fun: working towards a goal can be enjoyable, especially when you
work as a team!
• Shared goals: we all want beautiful sheet music, but few people
have the expertise (and nobody has the time!), to create a program
which can handle all situations. By working together – one person
improves the automatic beaming code, another person improves the
shape of slurs, and a third person writes documentation explaining
how to use these features – we can achieve our goal with only a
fraction of the individual effort.
• “Gift culture”: the Free Software movement has created many great
software projects, such as GNU/Linux (http://kernel.org/), Mozilla
Firefox (http://www.getfirefox.com/), and Battle for Wesnoth
(http://www.wesnoth.org/). Having benefitted from these projects,
some developers want to “give back” to the community.
• Work experience: contributing to free software projects is a great
way to practice programming, documentation writing, documentation
translation, or design. This experience has helped some developers
gain job offers or scholarships.
Where now?
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Still not convinced? Read our extensive essay about our engraving
philosophy in Background. If you’ve already decided to try
LilyPond, first read about our Text input.
Info Catalog
lilypond-web: Examples
lilypond-web: Introduction
lilypond-web: Background