Revenue and the Open Source edition

[RM]

That's a very well constructed bit of text and I tend to agree with you 
re "the best way to get the
resources required for maintaining and improving the Open Source
edition of LiveCode is actually to add Business-only features."

I don't know whether RunRev's "goods and services" section is attracting 
any customers.

Where I do take issue with Livecode is two-fold:

1. The rental concept: I would like to pay a flat fee that would buy me 
a version that would continue being usable as
long as I decided its value had not been superseded by newer versions 
and/or feature creep in Operating systems.

2. The enormous differential between the FREE version and the Commercial 
version: this seems almost an unbridgeable
gap.

Richmond.

On 2.05.2016 15:40, Peter TB Brett wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I recently posted on the forums in reply to being asked why the PDF 
> external is initially going to be exclusive to Business edition, and I 
> thought it would be useful to cross-post it here.
>
> http://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=27160#p141910
>
>> I am the main advocate for LiveCode Open Source within the LiveCode
>> core dev team, and maybe I can address some of these issues.
>>
>> The core dev team needs to eat and pay rent, so LiveCode Ltd. has to
>> make some money to help support LiveCode development. The vast
>> majority of work we do (90%+) goes directly into the Open Source
>> edition of LiveCode. To raise money to pay the core dev team's
>> salaries, the company sells Indy and Business subscriptions that let
>> people make closed-source programs with LiveCode.
>>
>> The revenue needs to grow, so that the core dev team can expand, so
>> that all the things that people are asking for (like Raspberry Pi
>> support, further work on HTML5 deployment, an improved networking
>> library, etc.) can be created. This means getting more people to pay
>> for subscriptions. However, many users don't think that Indy and
>> Business are good value for money because "all" that they get is
>> closed-source deployment. To help these users justify upgrading to a
>> subscription, the company has bought in some externals from 3rd party
>> vendors and bundled them into the Indy and Business editions -- first
>> mergExt, and now a PDF external.
>>
>> At the moment, I am struggling in internal discussions when I argue
>> for bringing neat new features to the Open Source edition. Evidence
>> over the last year or so suggests that adding a feature to the
>> Business or Indy edition makes a much bigger boost to subscription
>> revenue -- revenue which funds improvements and maintenance of all
>> editions of LiveCode. Even when you consider the new Business-only
>> features like the PDF viewer, these still reflect a minority of the
>> work we do; taking these into account still leaves almost all the
>> work we do going directly into the Open Source edition of LiveCode.
>>
>> In many ways, I feel that at the moment the best way to get the
>> resources required for maintaining and improving the Open Source
>> edition of LiveCode is actually to add Business-only features. Do you
>> have a better idea? For example, some people have suggested keeping
>> the source code on GitHub but charging people for access to Community
>> builds as a way to get revenue to support the Open Source edition.
>> What do you think?
>
> I know there are a lot of people who use the Open Source edition of 
> LiveCode on this mailing list, and I would appreciate your feedback.
>
>                                       Peter
>