Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

[Dr. Hawkins]

I'll preface this with that I am quite familiar with open source, have
a Ph.D. in Economics, and published the first paper that actually
explained why and when open sourcing software or backing open source
solutions can make solid commercial sense.

I'm not quite seeing that here.

Apple really sells hardware, and distinguishes Darwin with OS/X on top of it.

IBM really sells served web pages, and would get no advantage, just
more costs, from a proprietary unix or server, thus massively backs
Linux & Apache.

Is netscape really still around?

Sun needed an office suite that would run on their unix, and wouldn't
be able to charge a larger total price for calling OpenOffice a
separate product; the market they saw was server + light workstations
+ stuff to run.

The closest I see is redhat's commercial side.

But are there enough developers that would pay for support?  Some of
us (most?) will; the thousand or two a year is a small part of our
expenses if we're full time (and in my case, is one or two annual
licenses for my own product).

Boosting sales of web serving (I don't see that working on the
commercial side, though; pricing, etc. isn't even close to competitive
for just serving, and how many *need* that extra bit of livecode
maintenance on the server?)

I love the idea, and particularly the inevitable early open source
change of switching from single monolithic files to some sort of
revision control for our stacks.  And some of the customization I
would want.

But I just can't see where the revenue stream that keeps livecode
around will be.

hawk

-- 
Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462