BETA RELEASE: LiveCode 6.1.0 Release Candidate 2

[Monte Goulding]

On 01/07/2013, at 12:42 PM, Dr. Hawkins wrote:

> I have no problem with FOSS.  In fact, I wrote the seminal economics
> paper on it . . .
> 
> The licensing of the community edition, though, "infects" software
> shipped with it.  The existence of an open source branch of my
> software would be catastrophic for me.
> 
> And, frankly, GPL3 is scary.  I'd like to recode my market software in
> livecode, which I'd release open source, but I can't do that on the
> community edition.  I'll release it BSD, even public domain, but I
> won't risk releasing *anything* GPL3  (I think it was a serious error
> to use GPL3 instead of 2 for livecode).
> 
> If I don't touch the community edition, there can be no claim to GPL3
> from the High Church of Emacs on any of my work.
> 

We are talking server here so the virility of the license only comes into play when you distribute the server with your code. Given there's no standalone build process for LC server it's probably simpler not to distribute the server yourself anyway in which case  you are only distributing text files which you can license whichever way you want.

There's only two reasons anyone would want the commercial version of LC Server:
 - 1 using password protection on stacks to either keep your code closed when distributing or to use some third party plugin
 - 2 distributing your code and LC Server in a bundle for third parties to install

As I said above #2 can be worked around by just not bundling it but providing instructions for download and installation from RunRev servers instead. #1 is a potential issue for some but seeing as you were contemplating PHP which has no such code protection mechanism it's easy to assume that's not your problem.
> 
> 
>> BTW I didn't say they weren't going to do a commercial version of the server... just
>> that it might reasonably be seen as a low priority. LiveCode hasn't got a massive user
>> base... the percentage of users using server is small...
> 
> Dual licensing can make a lot of sense in certain circumstances (and
> it appears that LiveCode, like OpenOffice, is one of those).  This
> works because contributions to the community version aren't accepted
> without being submitted to the commercial branch.
> 
> However, you absolutely cannot make the *paid* version second-class,
> lagging behind the other.

It's not lagging... the only *feature*  of LC community server is its license... otherwise you may as well use 5.whatever the last build was.
> 
>> the percentage that really
>> need commercial server would be only a handful. The percentage of those that can't
>> continue to use the last available commercial version given there's really no
>> features added? are there any?
> 
> For those doing an application and a web version, this absolutely
> locks them into an archaic branch, not allowing the use of any newer
> features . . .

There aren't any newer features yet on server. When there are it will be worthwhile jumping up and down about it but for now I'm happy to give RunRev the chance to sort it out in their own time.

--
M E R Goulding 
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