Kickstarter 2013 Revisited

Sun May 10 11:34:05 EDT 2015

Thanks for taking the time to air this Richard. I generally agree with the
sentiment. I'd see much of this being resolved by redefining the nature of
the interface between LiveCode Ltd and the community. The diaogue is not
there suficiently. It's not there with regard to roadmaps, the on-rev
server outage, and the Kickstarter goals.

You have my vote to be sent to Edinburgh to investigate and report back?
You speak the same language after all :)

On Sunday, May 10, 2015, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, it is now some 2 and a half years since the Kickstarter
> which launched Runtime Revolution LiveCode as an Open Source
> project.
>
> Very many people contributed to that Kickstarter campaign.
>
> So it might be instructive to look at the following things:
>
> 1. How many of the goals have been achieved?
>
> 2. How many of the goals have not materialised?
>
> 3. How many of the goals have not materialised because they have been
> conveniently forgotten?
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Let me pause for a moment to have a few thoughts about the nature of
> contracts:
>
> a. A contract is where a group of people undertake to fulfil certain
> promises in return for something else.
>
> b. A contract can be a formal agreement, often written down and witnessed
> by others. It can, however, be informal and
> mutually understood - based on trust.
>
> c. A contract is normally understood to contain several items or events
> that are to be delivered within a stipulated amount of time.
>    Normally if those items or events are not delivered within the time
> stipulated there are penalties to pay.
>
> d. I would like to characterise the LiveCode Kickstarter campaign as
> setting up a number of contracts between Runtime Revolution
>     and the donors to the campaign.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The best place to check on the goals would seem to be here:
> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1755283828/open-source-edition-of-livecode/posts/439754
>
> where there is a hyperlink "Visit it now" - but that takes the user to the
> LiveCode blog.
>
> Here:
> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1755283828/open-source-edition-of-livecode/posts/415346
>
> We can read this:
>
> "Delivery Estimate
>
> Reaching these totals means that we will start work on these items in
> parallel. Some of these items do have dependencies on other items being
> completed first (Pluggable Themes & Cocoa is essential before Windows RT
> for example). We'll work to deliver those items with dependencies as
> quickly as we can. We expect to be able to deliver everything within a few
> months of the main release."
>
> Which is, either intentionally or not, untrue.
>
> One of the Kickstarter goals was a new GUI: we still do not have that.
>
> Importing SVG files does not seem to work (LC 7.0.0).
>
> "Windows/Phone 8 with Theme": where is that?
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Several times I have stated that I think RunRev are so busy racing towards
> "the bright new future" they are forgetting about
> a lot of other things.
>
> If a contract based on trust is broken, then one wonders whether
> participants in that contract should go on trusting the participant(s)
> who betrayed that trust.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I did not donate to the HTML5 kickstarter campaign for 2 reasons:
>
> 1. My funds are extremely limited.
>
> 2. Why should I donate to a kickstarter when the terms of the previous one
> were very far from being honoured?
>
> Had things been different I would have found money to donate to the HTML5
> campaign.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Anecdotal breathing space ---------------------
>
> Every 2 or 3 months the parents of children I teach English to pay me
> money in advance for teaching and ancillary goods and services
> [textbooks, pencils, fruit tea, and so on].
>
> If I then didn't turn up to teach those kids, very quickly I would be out
> of a job and my reputation would be mud; as it would also be if
> I didn't take very great pains to make sure that my teaching is focussed
> and of a high quality.
>
> The parents of the children who teach me take a risk every time they pay
> me: however, it is a calculated risk based on my previous
> performance (after 10 years it is reasonably good). It would, however,
> only take one "cock up" to ruin that reputation instantly.
>
> Not very long ago I was walking along the river here in Plovdiv, and I saw
> a notice for a new EFL school, and wandered in. The only person there was a
> woman who I remembered seeing before in a similar situation 3 years before.
> I asked her how business was going, to which she replied that
> it wasn't. Subsequent "sniffing around" turned up that that woman had
> closed a previous school owing parents chunks of money two years before:
> she had, as one of my Mum's friends says "shat on her own doorstep".
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I am also tired of those who "sing from the RunRev choir" [RG, JLG, and so
> on] who endlessly seem to defend the indefensible at
> no obvious profit to themselves.
>
> What is needed is an itemised list of all the Kickstarter goals and
> stretch goals; when those that have been reached were reached,
> a realistic chart of when those that haven't been reached will be reached,
> and an explanation of exactly why RunRev have engaged in
> other projects before they have completed all those goals.
>
> I suspect that some of the Kickstarter goals have been quietly dropped;
> either because they have turned out, on closer examination,
> to be unreasonably difficult to implement, or because RunRev have got
> distracted by objects just over the horizon. These points
> also need to be addressed.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2014-April/200290.html
>
> http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2014-April/200853.html
>
>
> http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/New-Visual-Editor-td4678215.html
>
> This last one is interesting as it contains a link to a page that DID
> contain the mockup for a new GUI, but RunRev have silently changed that
> so it is no longer there.
>
> It seems amazing to me that having received quite a sum of money from the
> 2 kickstarter campaigns RunRev seems not to
> feel some sort of accountability to the donors - a tee shirt is not
> accountability (especially if what is written on that tee-shirt
> is only a broken promise).
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I have taken quite some time to write this, and the reason that I have
> taken the trouble is that, oddly enough, I both believe in Runtime
> Revolution, and have put a very significant amount of time and effort into
> learning how to get the thing to do things over the last 14 years.
>
> Had I come to it just before the Open Source Kickstarter campaign I don't
> think I would have bothered, and I don't think I would be working
> with LiveCode just now.
>
> Richmond.
>
>
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