Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richard is quite right and has given a series of very clear explanations of
how open source, and particularly dual licensing, works.  This is a very
promising decision.  Its not risk free of course, nothing in business is,
but it has the potential to make the pie a lot bigger, and bigger enough
that even a smaller share of it is much bigger than what Rev has now.

It also has the potential to remove the Hypercard danger - that of being
stuck in an orphaned product.  If its open sourced that can never happen. 
As Hypercard showed, its a risk that is sometimes more than theoretical. 
Just the removal of that risk will widen the appeal of LiveCode in many
important environments and help enlarge the pie.

Yes, it has risks, and as Richard pointed out earlier, one of the risks is
forking.  But as he also says, in practice, while anyone can fork an open
sourced product, they mostly only do so under serious duress and
dissatisfaction.  The most notable recent cases where this has happened are
the Libre Office/Open Office case.  Before that there was the xfree86/xorg
case.  In both cases people were really upset by the behavior of the
official developer.

But this is not going to happen if Rev behaves reasonably, and they have
always been reasonable and pragmatic up to now, so why should that change?

Al



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