[ANN] Release 9.0.0 DP-5

[Richmond Mathewson]

One of the points that might be brought up at this point is that 
LiveCode in presented as a complete
programming language/packet in itself; there is no indication given that 
users of LiveCode are expected
to know other, lower-level languages too.

I suspect that a very high proportion of people who use LiveCode, 
whether one of the 2 commercial offerings, or the free offering, do so 
just because they have either (like myself) done their level best
to forget all the command-line languages of their youth, or don't know 
any and don't wish to learn any.

Richmond.

On 3/7/17 12:23 am, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
> Andre Garzia wrote:
>
> > The fact that these decisions are being taken, where the HQ appears
> > to be focusing more and more on business licensees feels like I am
> > being forced into such license. At this moment, I am starting to
> > wonder if there is any reason to be indy at all.
>
> ...or Community.
>
> Finding the best mix of features for the the two proprietary licenses 
> and the open source edition is a challenge.
>
> I spent the last several days at the SoCal Linux Expo, and had good 
> talks with team members from NginX, MariaDB, Nextcloud, and Ubuntu.
>
> Those are among the strongest open source projects around, and all of 
> them keep the projects going by offering paid services and software 
> packages aimed at the enterprise audience.
>
> On the surface it would appear that what they're doing is similar to 
> what LiveCode is doing, and in some broad respects I suppose it is.
>
> But I believe there are also at least two key differences:
>
> - The for-fee-only offerings from those other companies are indeed
>   specialized for larger customers, and the core free (libre and
>    gratis) software is full-featured to the point of being best-of-
>   breed.
>
> - The communities surrounding those projects contribute a much larger
>   percentage of the core free software.
>
> With LiveCode, the company restricts a broader range of functionality 
> to the proprietary editions, but they're also paying for a much larger 
> percentage of programmer-hours going into the package.
>
> Personally, I believe a healthy long-term balance would be more on par 
> with those other projects, with more stuff shared across all editions 
> and having that become possible because more of it comes from the 
> community.
>
> The tricky part is how to get from here to there.
>
> Many of those projects are technologies that some of the world's 
> biggest companies rely on, and many of those companies have full-time 
> employees dedicated to contributing to those open source projects.  At 
> Heroku, for example, they maintain two full-timers whose only job is 
> to submit pull requests for postgreSQL, and Google pays for a lot of 
> the development of Python.
>
> The LiveCode world does not yet have a Google or Heroku in our 
> community covering payroll for full-time engine developers.
>
> So the question at hand for all of us, company and community alike, is:
>
>    What is the best balance of free and non-free offerings
>    that will not only grow the platform, but also keep the
>    ship running in order to pursue that growth?
>
> I don't have an easy answer on this.  But I believe it is a very 
> important question.
>
> And it may be harder to answer for this project than for others, for a 
> great many reasons related to both the market the project serves and 
> the complexity of delivering rich GUI authoring for so many platforms.
>
> As just one comparison, my understanding is that the LiveCode code 
> base is at least 30% larger than the code base for NginX.  Not only is 
> LC a bigger project by that measure, but also arguably in terms of 
> code complexity, because the touch-points for NGinX are limited to a 
> relatively small number of OS APIs for networking and file I/O, but 
> LiveCode needs those along with a vast number of broadly-varying GUI 
> messaging APIs on top of that.
>
> As I ponder this question, I recognize that while I'm not in a 
> position to cover full-time salaries for LiveCode contributors, I can 
> invest a certain percentage of my time each week to the project in 
> light of the many practical benefits it offers my company.
>