OT: Priorities (was: Re: Stack with the same name loop)

[Paul McClernan]

On Sat, Oct 23, 2021 at 12:49 PM Richmond via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> What seems to come out of your interesting historical observations is
> that HyperCard went "wrong" when people had to start paying for it.
>

 I think it was a series of things that went wrong with HyperCard.

Interestingly enough WINE (open source) and CodeWeavers (prop.) seem to
> manage to co-exist and help each other successfully.
>

I can think of quite a few examples of successfully making use of
"FreeWare" and Open Source Software and building successful
commercial endeavors from them. Another example that comes to mind as I
surf apps on my smart TV is the streaming media platform PLEX, which is
available on just about every platform, Computers, TVs, Game Consoles,
Mobile, that started as a fork of XMBC (XBox Media Center) now called KODI.

In fact you could take that further. As I mentioned, the NeXT software that
became modern macOS, was originally built with a freeware C compiler, GCC.

 I guess it's easy to forget these days that large swaths of modern
computing / networking is built on top of ideas and work done by those that
came before, much of it as "freeware", including various libraries such as,
drawing / graphics FreeType, Cairo or more recently Skia, or things
Konquer / WebKit, Chromium and PDFium, used by many a commercial software
titles you may be using right now (not naming any names ;) )

I wonder how much benefit those freeware projects get in return? I believe
the reason why WINE changed to LGPL license from a more liberal license in
the early 2000s is because they didn't!

Taking it much, much further, the entire Internet (ARPNET), with its
nuclear attack proof decentralized networking, is (was?) a "freeware",
thats creation was largely subsidized by UK and US tax payers (yes, thanks
Al Gore, hah!).

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