LC MISTAKES

[Richard Gaskin]

Nigel Soden wrote:

 > ...I'm a fairly new-bee to LC and to date I must say that I look
 > forward to coming home after working in C# .Net (F...$%^&* usless.
 > s....) and working on some projects for my son.

How much more fun would things be if your day job also had you working 
in LiveCode?

This is the world we can begin to approach if we can pull off this 
Kickstarter campaign.

Regardless of individual merit, proprietary languages can rarely if ever 
be as popular as free and open languages.

Today, most of the coding jobs are for Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, and 
other open source languages.

If LiveCode could go open source it gains an accessibility and 
legitimacy that at last puts it on equal footing with those languages.

LiveCode's merits are clear.  The open source world has never seen 
anything like it.  Sure, there are numerous dynamically-compiled 
high-level languages, but none with a rich and flexible GUI object model 
so well integrated, on so many platforms.

An open source language can get the attention of many types of people 
and organizations who simply won't consider a sole-source proprietary 
language, no matter how useful it is.

But that can change.

The Kickstarter campaign is the key.

Not just for what it can do for us who already enjoy the benefits of 
working with LiveCode, but also for the millions who will then be in a 
position to consider it.

Consider where MySQL was when it was only proprietary, and how far it's 
come since it began offering a free and open edition.

Then consider what the world would look like if LiveCode had a community 
even just one-fourth the size of Python's.

That's not an unrealistic expectation.  In the long term, it may be a 
conservative one.

--
  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