hair-pulling frustration

[Dr. Hawkins]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>
wrote:


> Obviously Dr Hawkins is not over-enamoured of the Open Source theory:
> LiveCode is paid for in a different way [the "I'll scratch your back if
> you'll scratch mine" way] than the 'standard' commercial way [I pay you,
> and you do ALL the work].
>

Actually, I published the seminal paper on the economics of open source
software, and am quite familiar with it.

I purchased a $1k/year commercial license before the kickstarter campaign,
and have never used the community version (and given the GPL3, probably
never will, at least not until there are US court cases).

While I'm at it, instead of the "you get the same license" on the
kickstarter campaign, I ended up with the newer, subscription license.  But
that's a whole separate issue.

When I'm paying for a license, I expect things to generally work, not to be
test cases.



> Of course Dr Hawkins does not really make a distinction between 'developer
> previews' and 'release candidates' (which are marked
> as such to signal a lower level of confidence in their functional
> completeness than 'stable' versions. He does, however, state
> that 'stable' versions are not much better than the others, and that is
> where the problem lies.
>

Sure I do; but each is inflated.

Normal parlance is that an alpha release executes, a beta release is
feature complete and generally works but with bugs expected to be found,
and that a release has been tested.

LiveCode's developer previews simply execue (nightly snapshot that
executed), the RC are alpha quality, the 5.5 series are late beta, and the
6.x and 7.x releases are early beta.

When or if I come to thinking about buying a commercial version of LiveCode
> I will be in a very odd position, not really knowing whether
> I am buying a version that is, really, stable, or just something beta-ish
> labelled 'stable' which will then cause all sorts of unforeseen
> problems with my product.


My attitude would probably be far different if I were using a community
version . . . I understand the open source and mixed models quite well, but
would be far better off with a fixed and working 5 than what the efforts
have been spent on the last couple of years.

-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462