Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

Mark Wieder mwieder at ahsoftware.net
Mon Feb 4 12:45:05 EST 2013


Dr. Hawkins <dochawk at ...> writes:

> The OSS branch can never get orphaned.  The commercial branch can, however ...
> 
> Now I'm musing about ways to deal with that; perhaps an exception that
> allows the proprietary standalone to be built if certain events occur?
>  a cod escrow?

Thank you. I've been waiting for someone to notice this.

One of the obstacles to LiveCode's acceptance in the Real World is that there's
a single point of failure: what happens if something happens to RunRev? They go
out of business (now it's *me* thinking the unthinkable), they get acquired by
Larry Ellison, they do the HyperCard thing and just disappear...

With a closed source engine and no code escrow we're all out of luck. And that's
a serious impediment for any company that's thinking about investing their
future in LiveCode as a platform. By open-sourcing the engine we've got several
options. The community can take it forward, the code can get forked, our
investment is future-proof. The only things that wouldn't be covered are the
parts that you would need a commercial license for: stack protection, etc, and
that's the same situation we have today. It would be nice if a code escrow
arrangement could be worked out for those, but first things first.

-- 
 Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net

...now that I've seen "cod escrow" I can't unsee it...







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