A question

Welcome Markpd, because yet all is not lost. ;-)
Paraphrasing ...
If I do not do something for others, who will?
And if not now, when?

Buona musica!

Ha! The answer is that the software's professionalism is part and parcel of its freedom. To get an idea of how fast MuseScore development progresses, check out this blog post: https://musescore.org/en/user/101731/blog/2016/07/01/developing-musesco…

Right there, six people are named who had never helped with MuseScore before this summer. If MuseScore followed a commercial business model, it would still be an embarrassingly limited tool with a tiny development team, perhaps making a little money but purchased by virtually nobody (there are many such music notation programs out there). As free and open-source software, though, MuseScore has the ability to attract volunteer programmers from every corner of the world to build the software. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-source_software… has a good description of the system.) That's how MuseScore came to be as great as it is, and that's how we know the future is even brighter.

Hi Mark, I'll take a swing at unravelling the mystery.

First of all, MuseScore is free because of a choice made by its creator and lead developer, Werner Schweer. When he started developing MuseScore in 2002, he decided to make his code available under the GPLv2 license. By doing that, he gave anybody the freedom to check out his code, adapt it, build it and distribute it further, and most of all, help him out to improve it. So free in this context actually means free as in 'free speech' and not free as in 'free beer'.

A couple of years after Werner made his code available, Nicolas Froment (lasconic) and myself joined him with the development. My own personal motive was twofold. As an amateur piano player, I always needed sheet music in order to play my favourite songs, but either I couldn't find any sheet music for those songs, either the arrangement I obtained didn't work for me. Additionally, I have always had a hard time reading sheet music (dyslexia), so I was looking for a music learning tool that could leverage all the advantages and possibilities which comes digital sheet music such as playback, tempo change, looping, etc. You can also read more of my personal journey with MuseScore in this interview.

Still you may be wondering why MuseScore is free as in "free beer" or gratis software. After all it's not because MuseScore is free and open source software, that one can't put a price on it, on the contrary. No, it's gratis because we wanted tackle a much larger problem. It's linked to a paradox in the music market, which is preventing aspiring musicians from learning their favourite songs.

So what's the paradox? While never before in history so much music is being released as recorded audio, so little is made available in written form, i.e. sheet music. The reason is partly because so many sheet music publishing houses have gone out of business in the past decades. And those who remained in business are mainly focussing on producing sheet music from best seller songs only, and for the most popular instrumentation only. So how can we reverse this downtrend? There is a simple but bold solution. What if we could empower musicians all over the world with free and great notation software, and as a result democratise the creation of sheet music. It all leads to the making of a movement, which can bring growth again in this segment of the music market.

This is what drives Werner, Nicolas and myself to work on MuseScore, day in and day out for the past decade, because we feel we are actually making a serious impact on the availability of sheet music. We feel strengthened by the 500+ contributors who have helped to improve the MuseScore notation software during the past years, and also by the daily messages we receive from the MuseScore users who explain how much MuseScore has changed their musical life. Still, we have only set a few steps into the long path of making our vision reality. Obviously this can only be made possible when there is backing of a sustainable business model which works for everyone involved, but that's a topic for another future post.

I hope this sheds some light on why the MuseScore notation software is available for free for everyone and why there is this drive to make it the best software available on the market to notate music.