Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

Todd Geist todd at geistinteractive.com
Fri Feb 1 19:52:21 EST 2013


François Chaplais wrote:
> So I spend months, which become years implementing, say, a decent math library for Livecode....
> Who pays the rent?????
>
You do, by creating value for your customers. You can sell the closed 
source library if you get a commercial license for LiveCode.  Or more 
than likely you open source your library, and make your money by 
building great software using your library and the libraries of many 
others that are freely available.

While the field of economics may have difficulty explaining exactly why 
Open Source works, the question of wether or not it DOES work has been 
answered. Most of the modern infrastructure of the world wide web and 
the vast majority of internet connected devices, with the exception of 
MS based PCs, are based on open source projects.  Its a done deal. It works.

Now one might reasonably question if LiveCode is a good candidate for 
open source or not.  I think that remains to be seen. But I think it is 
something that LiveCode has to do, and I welcome it.

Todd








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