Free software is good for your mental health

• Feb 23, 2013 - 06:39

Ten years ago we used to have MS Office at work. I remember I used to hate the programs. They did a lot of great things but they were also mildly buggy and had some very annoying faults in the program design. I knew my employer had paid a lot of money for the licenses, which actually fed my hate for the programs (I work at a public school, so it was my tax money). For all that money, the programs should have worked better. Then at some point we skipped MS and moved to OpenOffice. My hate disappeared. I had a feeling that the programs worked better. Actually they didn't. But I found out that I didn't mind. I worked better! I still use OpenOffice and wouldn't care for anything else. Each bug, each annoying detail, each lacking feature is still something I didn't pay for. I'm still grateful to all the people behind these programs.
Exactly the same has happened with notation software. I have an Encore license. I started with Rhapsody, which was a light version of Encore. After that I've updated to Encore, which I've updated maybe three times. Well, I've never hated Encore, but I've hated each bug and every backwardly designed feature in it. And the hate of course is fed by the thought that I paid for it. I even bought the last update because of the XML export feature, only to find out that it did a lousy job and left a lot of stuff unexported.
Now I use only MuseScore for all music I write. Each bug, each annoying detail, each lacking feature is still something I didn't pay for. Nothing to hate here! I'm free to pay, if I want. And I did. I paid for being able to upload my music to musescore.com, which is one way to support MuseScore development. And look what happens! I hate again! Well, not actually hate. But I'm slightly annoyed again. I paid for something, which didn't work very well. I did this video score thing and the score view couldn't show the repeats correctly. Not a big deal, but at least I experienced again this annoyance, which proves my statement that free software is good for your mental health.
Bottom line is that I still feel mentally healthy working with MuseScore. No annoyance is blocking my creative flow. The tiny annoyance I have is captured inside a box called musescore.com. And I will continue using that site, too, in spite of its minor flaws, which I'm sure are going to be fixed some day.


Comments

In reply to by Shoichi

I use MuseScore as my *only* music notation program, mostly to do modern performing editions of early music (you may find here the scores I can considered 'finished').

In all my scores, the colophon proudly says:

"Typeset with MuseScore (//musescore.org )."

As I can make them using open source software *only* (from MuseScore to fonts to utilities to manipulate PDF and thumbnails), the least I can do is to make all my scores freely downloadable to everybody.

Thanks to MuseScore authors and to the authors of all the other free / open source software I use now (or I can use in the future)!!

M.

In reply to by Miwarre

You forgive me?
If so, go right ahead.
I can not find (or not capable) references to the FSFE.
Of the many that we are (by the way how many we?) seems to me that many are not here just for the asking.*
Thus someone may be interested in the attempts to support the open source in general, MuseScore in our case.
So here's the link: http://fsfe.org/about/history/doi.en.html
Greetings to all, Franz

If I discovered the hot water ... reread the first line ;-)

*Less than 0.016% of the post was not answered (and, of those, many were not questions but statements).
This is another of the merits of MuseScore

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