Business Application Framework

[Kevin Miller]

Thank you to everyone for all your input so far.

Kickstarter was never intended to cover all development costs for
everything we do. Software moves on, platforms move on, development
continues at an astonishing speed in the digital world. Kickstarter was
intended to fund extra developers to help deliver the clearly defined
Kickstarter goals. It was also intended to allow you, the community, to
contribute more, directly, to the development of LiveCode.

We¹ve gone Open Source, done the refactor project, the last major piece
needed to fulfill the remaining stretch goals is the extensibility of 8.
That is maturing rapidly. We¹ve spent well over 2x the total we raised in
getting to where we are now. A big component of that is the funds that
come from our commercial licensing revenue. So from an Open Source backer
perspective, you should be aware that we¹ve more than match funded the
entire campaign so far! Yes, its taken longer than projected. This does
not lessen our commitment to any of it. Be comforted by this calculation:
delivering everything we've done so far *without* the crowdfunding
campaigns we estimate would have taken us around 15 years. We've done it
in two. Thank you.

We said during Kickstarter that the product would be dual licensed. That
means we have an Open Source Community Edition and a closed source
Commercial Edition. We made it clear we would continue to have a
commercial product. At no stage did we ever imply otherwise.

We¹ve tweaked the product lineup periodically as lots of tech companies
do. The Business License is an iteration on the Pro license which has been
in the store for a long time. The Business Framework and the other
business features we¹re working on have nothing to do with the Kickstarter
goals. Indeed success with these initiatives simply mean we¹re in a
position to further invest in Open Source, bringing many features that go
beyond the original Kickstarter goals. And with the extensibility coming
in 8, we expect to see far more code contributions and community created
widgets. That whole process will be far easier and offer much greater
flexibility to those of you that want to get more involved in the
Community side of things.

Anyone who knows us knows that we wouldn¹t do something like going Open
Source if it wasn¹t something we believed in. The fact that we have
delivered, and will continue to deliver, the vast majority of our effort
in that way speaks for itself and will continue to do so. You chose to
back a commercial company, and we have a responsibility to everyone to run
a viable organization that properly services the needs of our whole user
base. There is never a perfect way to please absolutely everyone,
compromises have to be made along the way. We continue to consult our user
base very widely, listen to feedback and carefully weigh things up so we
can balance the needs of as many in our community as we possibly can.
We¹ve done that, for the most part successfully for many years. That is
what we are going to continue to do.


Kind regards,

Kevin

Kevin Miller ~ kevin at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps