Open Source Software in Church

[DrT]

I am new to the site, but have been a regular visitor for some time. A while ago I was asked by the Parish priest to take over the organization of music in one of the two churches in our rural parish. I started to incorporate music into the Sunday sheet I produced for each mass. Perhaps it is some Scottish gene, but I refuse to pay for Sibelius of the like. I have been a long advocate of Open Source software, having used Linux in various forms for many years. Using NOTEEDIT to produce the score, LILYPOND to produce a typeset preview for copying and pasting into an OPENOFFICE word document - which I export as a pdf directly, I can lay up the sheet in a matter of minutes - for a total software cost of ZERO.

Does anyone else out there use Linux to satisfy their liturgical needs?

[VML]

Free software is great if you can use it efficiently.
But there are copyright issues to address if you are reproducing music in any way on service sheets unless it it all your own compositions, and even then, acknowledgment has to be given for reproducing the texts of the liturgy. [http://www.catholic-ew.org.uk/liturgy/Resources/Copyright/Info.htm

(How do you make those clever links that people put in??) [/i]

[dunstan]

Mmm, can OpenOffice take an EPS import?

My first attempts I generated a png from Lilypond, but you have to decide whether to have the thing legible or with a monstrously big file. Most modern printers have pretty fine resolutions, and you end up able to see the pixelation from the png.

I got round it by generating EPS, which I suck into MS word (work supplied computer). The tiff previewing shows you a right mess, but if you create a PDF using something like FreepdfXP you'll see that it holds up to extreme magnification because the music is a vector representation, not raster.

[admin]

Does anyone else out there use Linux to satisfy their liturgical needs?

Here's some info from the SSG website stats:
Visitors using
Windows: 77.5%
Macintosh: 20%
Linux: 2%
unknown: 0.5%

So, the answer probably is "not really".

Interesting though that Dell are starting shipping desktops with preinstalled Linux (Red Hat, I think) as from this week. Perhaps the stats will become more balanced over time…

[musicus]

Does anyone else out there use Linux to satisfy their liturgical needs?

Well! I'd heard that Linux was good, but...

[DrT]

I'm very careful to only use materials we have covered under our Calumus licence. We are also using Paul F Ford's "By Flowing Waters" which has copyright disclaimers on the website. Does anyone else use this selection on a regular basis?

Perhaps I can persuade one or two to try open source software - particularly using Linux - and bring the percentage up a bit from a lowly 1%.

Dunstan - Noteedit uses Lilypond to produce a print preview. Portions can be selected to the clipboard and pasted directly into Open Office - very easy and not very large!

There are some Live CD's which offer a chance to try the software out without touching your hard disk. Try http://www.musix.org.ar/ or http://www.ferventsoftware.com/index.php for downloads.

[Ian]

One to watch is 'Canorus', an open-source score editor that has grown out of the NoteEdit project. It's at an early stage of development, but is designed to be cross-platform: there are versions for Linux, Mac and Windows.

See canorus.berlios.de