dtoub

chelgrian said:

It’s an almost certainty it couldn’t be open sourced code bases this age tend to have all sorts of copyright issues and rights holders involved and it can be next to impossible track down all the right holders and to get the license changes needed. There are two relatively successful instances I know of which are Blender and Staroffice (which became open/libreoffice) I can’t think of any other successes.

For similar reasons it may be impossible to release a ‘sunset’ edition it’s very probable that they have third party licensed code or libraries which require periodic fees.

It’s very stupid but copyright law can make it prohibitively expensive or far too hard to allow software like Finale to continue vs forcing a hard end date.

Good points, and makes sense.

Been trying the free version of Dorico, and having followed it for some time, I am very much aware it is better software overall (Finale was underwhelming over the past few years in terms of updates) and has a very responsive team of developers and managers. But it is painfully hard for me to conform to its way of doing things. Just like I found Numbers not very useful for me personally compared with Excel, or various databases compared with Access. When you get to know a particular application, especially one as feature-packed as either Finale or Dorico, it's quite hard to make the switch. Compounding matters: many of us have a lot of recent and older Finale files, and sometimes we do need to go back to them and tweak them or use them to record audio; converting all of them to MusicXML is not the ideal solution. So I likely will try a virtual machine and use that for many years to come. Not perfect either, but at least it's future-proofed.

Problem is, I’m not aware there is any good way to delete the data, which sucks up several GB on my iPad and MBA (it isn’t an issue on my iPhone 14 Pro Max since that doesn’t support Apple “Intelligence”).