Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

[Richard Gaskin]

François Chaplais wrote:
> OK, open source is the cure for cancer...
> So I spend months, which become years implementing, say, a decent math library for Livecode....
> Who pays the rent?????

Whomever you can get to pay it.

If you want to keep the source proprietary, you can use a proprietary 
license and release your library under nearly any terms you like, just 
like we've always done.

If you want to share the code with the community, and do so in a way 
that requires other derivative works to be similarly shared, you can use 
the GPL-licensed version of LiveCode for that.

Free and open software gets paid for through a wide range of means, 
sometimes through grants, often from a personal desire to share, and 
frequently from donations by large corporations who derive value from 
the software.

For example, contributors to the Linux Foundation include HP, IBM, 
Intel, Oracle, Samsung, Cisco, Google, Toyota, Adobe, Yahoo, and many 
others.  In fact, now that they also allow individual memberships, I'm a 
contributor too (to the tune of just $99/year - now I get to tell Linus 
Torvalds that I pay his salary <g>).

Similarly, Apple funds WebKit, an open source project started by KDE, as 
well as CUPS, the open printing solution used by OS X, Linux, and some 
UNIX flavors.

In addition to donations and grants, some projects are funded through 
services and custom development.  Canonical makes most of the money it 
takes to make Ubuntu from that strategy, and Red Hat closed US$1 billion 
in sales last year doing it - not bad for a free OS.


RunRev isn't limiting distribution to only open source under the GPL. 
They're merely adding it.

In doing so, it makes a wide universe of new users available to it, but 
by no means does it limit any use under the proprietary license we've 
enjoyed all these years.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
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