Suggestion: Non-Appbuilding Community Edition

[Alex Tweedly]

On 04/09/2021 15:36, David Bovill via use-livecode wrote:
> So the question here is why not do the same here - keep a free-to-develop “trial version” without the compilation framework and tools. I’m curious to the reasoning. The cynic in me would say that the assumption is that there are too few developers in this (non-game) market who would need the compilation / stand-alone-builder functions - so while game developers and companies might pay for commercial Unity 3D licenses - that is not true for Livecode developers? I don’t / like / buy that argument - so I would love to here good reasons or not adopting a Unity 3D style licensing model?

I'm not familiar with Unity - so I'll answer just from a LC perspective 
(and in many ways just reinforce what Kevin said in his response to your 
original suggestion).

The problem with a free, no-app-builder version is that you can do so 
much with it.

You can make it easy (or even trivial) for anyone to install and run the 
stacks you create.

0. Either create your stack as a plugin, or create a plugin which gives 
a menu of apps to run.

Then instruct your users to:

1. Install LC (free-to-develop). LC's installation process is almost 
hands-free.

2. download/run a simple installer script or shell script which will put 
a stack into the (default location for) the plugins folder.

3. Run the IDE.

4. Follow the 3-click instructions to change the setting to start this 
plugin when LC starts up.

and you're done. It's not 100% as simple to install as a built app, but 
it's not rocket science.

And provided your stacks don't involve the menu system, users will 
probably not even notice that they're in the IDE. Design your app to 
look like it was "mobile-first" with its own menu built-in and 95% of 
your users would be happy.

Alex.