Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

[Richard Gaskin]

Dr. Hawkins wrote:

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

The other examples you noted weren't dual-licensed.  I think a good 
example here would be MySQL.

Before going dual-license, MySQL was just another foundering proprietary 
RDBMS, not much better or worse than a dozen others.

But through dual-licensing, they've been able to grow into a de facto 
standard, eventually becoming so huge Oracle had no choice but to buy 
them since MySQL was taking a huge bite out of Oracle.

I hope and pray the ultimate result here isn't acquisition by Larry 
Ellison, but I do hope the rest applies:

Being available to everyone as both free-as-in-beer and 
free-as-in-freedom, the audience can grow orders of magnitude larger 
than would be likely as a proprietary product.

As being a dev tool, there will be a certain percentage who will want to 
use it for proprietary deployment.

So even if the portion of the pie that needs a paid license is smaller, 
the pie would be so much bigger that net revenues would likely be a 
multiple of what they could be without the GPL option to evangelize it.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys