reporting

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Talluto wrote:

 > Are 3rd party developers not charging enough to make developing tools
 > viable?
 > Is the LiveCode community not large enough to support such
 > development models?
 > Do you agree with me or do you like the way things are going?
 >
 > Are we really getting what we need when we get what we want?

With open source tools I think part of this stems from an inadequacy in 
the English language:  we have one word, "free", for two very different 
things, "gratis" and "libre".

When English-speaking people hear "free software", they often think, 
"Ohooh, nice!  Gimme gimme gimme!".

But of course what has made open source software the driving force of 
tech industry isn't about its price (though that doesn't hurt 
proliferation of deployment), but collaboration.

I like to think of open source licenses as an invitation for community 
participation.  You can get it, modify, enhance it, and share it with 
others, and each time that happens the software gets ever more robust 
and feature-rich.

If instead we merely use free software and never contribute anything to 
it, if enough people do that it creates a circumstance of resource 
starvation, and the project will die.

To Jan's credit he also has a proprietary license available, with a 
Purchase link on his page:
<http://users.telenet.be/quartam/reports/index.html>

But absent there is any way for people to contribute to the project, 
with either code or cash donations, so he's unnecessarily limiting his 
options.


As for fully-proprietary tools, having started my company as a publisher 
of third-party add-ons for another tool, I can say that it can be 
profitable only under very rare circumstance.

In most cases it makes sense to invest the time in turning a tool you've 
made for yourself into a product (documentation, usability enhacement, 
etc.) only when that cost is minimal.

Steven McConnell reminds us that the difference between a tool and a 
product is often an order of magnitude:  "With a tool it need only be 
possible to use it correctly, but with a product it should be impossible 
to use it incorrectly".

Any add-on product for any language is a niche within a niche, so I 
wouldn't get all dreamy-eyed imagining a lucrative stock offering or 
acquisition coming from such a business. :)

Make tools you need 'em, share 'em as you see fit, and if some of those 
might make a little extra revenue to offset expenses that's even better.

While the software industry has many thousands of success stories, the 
number of people who've been able to retire on income from making 
add-ons to any development tool can be counted on one hand.

If you want to make friends, make dev tools.

If you want to make money, make consumer products.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com