Trying to make economic sense of open sourcing livecode

[Monte Goulding]

On 06/02/2013, at 3:59 PM, Dr. Hawkins wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 9:53 AM, Kevin Miller <kevin at runrev.com> wrote:
>> There will be a commercial code escrow option too, but that will be aimed
>> at larger companies and be specific to their individual use of the
>> platform.
> 
> I'm small, though.
> 
> Far larger than hobbyist; will probably become a company with a
> half-dozen employees and a few million a year in revenue (more than
> $2M; less than $10M).
> 
> Maintaining/modifying LiveCode itself would be more expensive than
> redeveloping for another platform.
> 
> A collective effort to maintain the commercial codebase, though, would
> be another story.
> 
> OK, planning for one's own unwanted demise is not pleasant, but I do
> estate planning law, too :)

In the event that LiveCode does become open source (which I'm starting to wonder if it's going to happen given the runs on the board so far) there will be a community of people that have an interest in maintaining the GPL source which is 99.9% of the commercial source so whoever the asset ends up in the hands of I'd be surprised if they weren't at least prepared to stick a part time dev in a dungeon somewhere to build commercial versions that people would be interested in purchasing. The return on investment would be pretty good at least as long as the contributor community was strong. Of course if it's not open source and there's no contributor community then app bets are off.

Cheers

--
M E R Goulding 
Software development services
Bespoke application development for vertical markets

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