The End of FINALE

[jrethorst]

I would suggest MM to remove all licensing, and make the software open-source, someone might just keep it running.

_Very_ good idea.

[mducharme]

I would suggest MM to remove all licensing, and make the software open-source, someone might just keep it running.

_Very_ good idea.

It is very highly unlikely this will be open sourced. Most likely they licensed a fair bit of third party code and used it in Finale, which was apparently quite common back in the day. This was the reason that GigaStudio could not be open sourced when it was similarly discontinued in 2008 or so.

To release it as open source, they would probably have to pay a programmer to do a full audit of the code and remove any code blocks that have code owned by third parties. This could be a huge effort and cost a lot of money as it could be months of work (for no return). I'm sure they likely didn't keep proper track of where they used third party code in Finale back in the 90's and whose code they used where.

After this process was completed, they could open source what was left (what hadn't been removed in that process), but there may be so many chunks of Finale missing that what is left may not be intelligible to anybody.

Even if you were lucky and most of the code was still intact after this process, it is by all accounts a huge mess and very hard to wrap your brain around, due to years of technical debt built up. Apparently MakeMusic tried to sell Finale to other vendors and they all turned it down because the code was such a mess it would have taken too much time to fix it and would have needed a total rewrite anyway. It would most likely become one of the many open-source projects out there that are dead and have nothing happening, because they are abandoned in favour of newer, shinier things.

The most probable result of MakeMusic open sourcing Finale is they would have to pay a developer for months to go through the code and remove code belonging to third parties, and at the end of it all, release an open source project that sits there with nothing happening with it because it's too big and too messy for people to even do small things with it, and to have the time to properly work on it, a good developer would need to be getting money to live from it, and if nobody is paying them a salary (and there is no income stream for this) it's just not going to happen.

Removing all licensing is likely more doable, but the problem with Finale is the way it was written, you never know when there are weird licensing checks in weird places because somebody used a temporary workaround for some issue. So releasing a version with removed licensing could actually create new bugs in the program.

[jrethorst]

I understand that the code was a mess, and that the move to Colorado cost MM some people who understood the architecture. But would a total rewrite actually have been impossible? It it would serve thousands of users, many professional, some with decades of files, who would be willing to pay for an upgrade. Just to abandon a market leader with that large a user base is simply astonishing.

[mducharme]

I understand that the code was a mess, and that the move to Colorado cost MM some people who understood the architecture. But would a total rewrite actually have been impossible? It it would serve thousands of users, many professional, some with decades of files, who would be willing to pay for an upgrade. Just to abandon a market leader with that large a user base is simply astonishing.

A total rewrite wouldn't have been impossible, but you see how long it took the former Sibelius team to design and build Dorico 1.0 (about 4 years) - and even then, Dorico 1.0 didn't even support piano pedalling. One of the lead Finale developers proposed a total rewrite of Finale back in 2010 or 2011 to MakeMusic management and MakeMusic wasn't interested. Presumably it would have involved Finale basically sitting there for 4 years without really getting much development while a new program was being developed alongside where they wouldn't get income for 4 years. Once it was finally released it wouldn't have nearly the feature set of Finale, so they'd be asking people to "upgrade" to a newer better Finale but with many features still missing. In many ways it wouldn't have been Finale anymore at all, but a new program by the same development team who worked on Finale. Even in the case of Dorico, while it is developing quickly and has added most things that people need, it still misses a few capabilities that more mature programs have like cutaway scores 8 years since its initial release and 12 years since they started developing it. But the capabilities that are there, the Dorico team has built smartly as to not create a mess. Finale became a mess from years of quick workarounds to add functionality that people were asking for, doing that the quickest way possible instead of the best way. Piling up bandaids on top of bandaids on top of bandaids for years on end instead of developing features the best way has a cost.

The time when MakeMusic could have done this has come and gone, I feel. I think there isn't much room left for new notation programs in the market at this point unless they offered something really different and target a specific niche. You've got Sibelius and Dorico on the professional market and MuseScore dominating the hobbyist market while starting to make some inroads with professionals. There are only so many people who need notation programs. The market was very different back in 2010 or 2011 when it was originally proposed to the management at MakeMusic, and then they could have done it if they were willing to lose money for 4+ years designing and building a new program, but now is a different story I think. They would really have to have a new angle that would be different and would target a certain type of user, and there would have to be enough of those users to allow the program to be sustainable and make enough income to pay the development team.

[jrethorst]

Nice explanation — thank you.