[FOSS] On the creation of Rev to Web tools

wayne durden wdurden at gmail.com
Wed Sep 15 11:27:19 EDT 2010


Hi Malte,

I too have pondered the question.  I ended up feeling that the "buy in"
required by the commercial nature of the main product limits uptake by young
blood (generally poor) in numbers necessary to create open source momentum.

I have watched Ruby go from zero to being on the radar in the interim, and
few up and comers are going to latch onto runrev/livecode in the same way.
The no cost versions of the product are limited by commercial necessity and
those limits will always weigh on the balance of youngsters choosing between
the full package in a "free" language/IDE versus a reduced package here.

It seems a by-product of the necessity of RunRev/Kevin/Markula/unknown
ownership interests et al. needing to earn a return on their investment.  I
have been discouraged in concluding that while the base may grow it probably
can never capture the explosive exponential growth phase that the truly
successful open source languages have that only come with a couple orders of
magnitude of extra sets of eyeballs in the mix.

The product remains a wonderful "secret weapon" but will always languish
behind the frontier of the evolving landscape.

I really wish that a wealthy benefactor like Bill Gates would buy the whole
thing and release it all and let a thousand variations bloom and weed
themselves out...

Until it is absolutely no cost for the full version you simply won't get
teens on board in number, the ones with unlimited time and no commercial
obligations, and otaku like devotion to tackle the next new thing...



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