LiveCode community edition is gone

Bernard Devlin bdrunrev at gmail.com
Wed Sep 1 06:26:22 EDT 2021


I can't say this surprises me. I didn't expect the open source offering to
do anything but cut into the bottom line. But certainty isn't achieved
until something is tried and actual results obtained. One of the good
things about having the code source was that there have been times when
I've wanted to suggest an enhancement and could look through the code
myself to see what would be required to bring it about. If it required only
a small change I could make that suggestion and the enhancement was easy to
make.

Over the years I've watched on general programming forums as whenever
HyperCard was brought up there was gushing praise for what it was. Whenever
someone then posted about LiveCode in this context, the gushing praise
turned to irrational hostility.  Pointing out that LC was cross-platform
beyond their wildest dreams, massively more capable than HyperCard, and
free to use made no difference to their irrational hostility  -- better was
worse. There you had a group of programmers who supposedly loved what
HyperCard could do, but they only loved that concept as a historical
artefact, not as a tool available to people now. No wonder none of them got
interested in the open source code.

Ironically the LC source can remain up on Github and as the past 8 years
have shown it's exceedingly unlikely that the advocates of open source will
take it and run with it. This can be contrasted with, for example, what
happened with the InterBase database - in the rage for open source some 20
years ago Borland put up the code for InterBase, but within a couple of
days changed their mind and took down the source code. But by then the
source had been downloaded and became the Firebird database. The closed
source InterBase is still for sale, even though Firebird ended up being
completely re-written based on the code released 20 years ago.

Someone posted this announcement by LC to news.ycombinator.com.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28370865  LC got less hostility from
this announcement than from when LC would be mentioned in the past as an
open source version of HyperCard.

At the end of the day, if not enough funds go into LC Ltd then both the
closed source and open source products would disappear - the past 8 years
have shown us there is very little interest in people contributing to the
source.  It's chalk and cheese when compared with InterBase/Firebird. After
8 years there simply aren't enough low-level programmers who have any
interest in a version of HyperCard for the 21st century.

I could have switched to using the open source version of LC 8 years ago,
but I continued to pay for a license because I understood that bills have
to be paid or Livecode disappears.

Regards, Bernard



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