Suggestion: Non-Appbuilding Community Edition

[Bernard Devlin]

I'm sure Kevin etc. doesn't share my view on this. But here it is. Get your
popcorn.

On Sun, Sep 5, 2021 at 2:56 PM Dan Brown via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

>
> It can't  be any more harmful than abruptly pulling the rug from under the
> feet of your largest user demographic. If revenue is the root of livecodes
> problems then I don't  see why a small demographic of lifetimers is exempt
> from an update in policy that seeks to increase the paying subscription
> count


Largest user demographic? Free-loaders who contributed no money but plenty
of baseless whining?

So many protest poverty but I'm 100% certain they spend more every year
than the cost of an annual license fee on plenty of other things. Some of
us paid for a license for years in order to fund something we believed in
and wanted to see thrive, even though that meant having to forego stuff
that the free-loaders would instead be spending their money on. FWIW my
health problems have made it difficult for me to do any work that required
keeping regular hours or even being able to keep appointments. Yet I'd
bought licenses for 18 years before I bought a lifetime license (I still
have unused licenses in my account, at one point in the last few years I
had three concurrent licenses).  When I hear "can't afford" I translate it
into "I prioritise my spending differently".  "If I don't make any
financial contribution to LC Ltd I can get a new iPhone" - that kind of
thing.  I just sacrificed other things in order to keep supporting LC.

When they had their free toys taken away the rampant hostility from the
free-loaders shows what little value they brought.  Some of those whining
free-loaders have barely made 80 posts on the Forum in the past 8 years.
Despite being a continuous license payer, despite my health problems, I
freely gave hundreds of hours of help to people on the Forum. Some of them
are saying "if LC Ltd had had a donate button, I'd have sent them some
money". Yeah, right - contacting LC Ltd and asking how they could
contribute financially was beyond their abilities.

In 25 years on the internet, I've never before seen such a collection of
valueless people as these whiners (they wouldn't be tolerated in any other
business or open source community).  Most of the users of the Community
edition are of so little value that they can't even be bothered to take
part in the Forum and provide support to other users! When I look at the
whiners compared to how few posts they even made on the Forum, I'm filled
with disgust.  Have they no shame? They contribute neither time nor money.

It's simple. Those who aren't parasites will decide to start contributing
financially. Those who are parasites will go away, and live off some other
community - and the absence of parasites will be beneficial. If just one of
those who isn't a parasite takes out a standard license it will take him
nearly 20 years to contribute as much financially as I have _since_ the
"community" edition was launched. People like me could have simply stopped
paying and used "the free edition" too, and this situation would have come
about much sooner. If it turns out all of those who used the Community
edition were parasites, what has LC Ltd lost if they vanish?

Parasite might sound like a strong word, but what word do you use for
someone who takes, takes, takes but never gives back, contributing nothing
else than to make an organism weaker?