Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

[Mark Schonewille]

Hi,

It is quite simple. Many consultants and companies will find it 
profitable to contribute to the LiveCode engine. RunRev can use these 
contributions and include them in the commercial version of LiveCode. 
This way, the commercially available engine will develop more quickly, 
which makes it more attractive to everybody and RunRev can sell more 
commercial licenses.

As an economist, you know that co-operation between two parties allows 
them to have complete information, which makes the market more 
efficient. An open-source licence makes free exchange of information 
between all involved parties possible. Of course, this is only one of 
many possible explanations.

Oh... btw I'm just trying to give you a clue. I don't mean to 
participate in an endless discussion on economic viability :-)

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

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On 2/1/2013 18:48, Dr. Hawkins wrote:
> 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
>