Revenue and the Open Source edition

[Mike Kerner]

As someone who pays in, I believe that if anything there should be more
things that are added to the indy/business end of the spectrum to get more
folks to pay in, and to get me to pay more.  We have paid to have things
added to LC, through externals and other third-party add-ons.  Most of
those are now available to everyone, and I'm ok with that.  Without revenue
growth, LC is going to always be gasping for air.  The only way that we get
cool new features if there is money to pay for effort.  While LCB will
hopefully allow others to contribute to LC, I think that there will not be
enough of it to make revolutionary leaps as frequently as we would want
them.  As the paid licenses generate more revenue, the freebees will see
feature growth, as well.

I am surprised at how few of the Business/Indy perks have gotten me
excited, though.  I want LC to convince me to spend more, but so far that
has not happened.  The Business and Indy licenses strike me as being steep,
compared to other tools that we pay for, so I want to see something for it
before I cough up more.

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 8:40 AM, Peter TB Brett <peter.brett at livecode.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I recently posted on the forums in reply to being asked why the PDF
> external is initially going to be exclusive to Business edition, and I
> thought it would be useful to cross-post it here.
>
> http://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=27160#p141910
>
> I am the main advocate for LiveCode Open Source within the LiveCode
>> core dev team, and maybe I can address some of these issues.
>>
>> The core dev team needs to eat and pay rent, so LiveCode Ltd. has to
>> make some money to help support LiveCode development. The vast
>> majority of work we do (90%+) goes directly into the Open Source
>> edition of LiveCode. To raise money to pay the core dev team's
>> salaries, the company sells Indy and Business subscriptions that let
>> people make closed-source programs with LiveCode.
>>
>> The revenue needs to grow, so that the core dev team can expand, so
>> that all the things that people are asking for (like Raspberry Pi
>> support, further work on HTML5 deployment, an improved networking
>> library, etc.) can be created. This means getting more people to pay
>> for subscriptions. However, many users don't think that Indy and
>> Business are good value for money because "all" that they get is
>> closed-source deployment. To help these users justify upgrading to a
>> subscription, the company has bought in some externals from 3rd party
>> vendors and bundled them into the Indy and Business editions -- first
>> mergExt, and now a PDF external.
>>
>> At the moment, I am struggling in internal discussions when I argue
>> for bringing neat new features to the Open Source edition. Evidence
>> over the last year or so suggests that adding a feature to the
>> Business or Indy edition makes a much bigger boost to subscription
>> revenue -- revenue which funds improvements and maintenance of all
>> editions of LiveCode. Even when you consider the new Business-only
>> features like the PDF viewer, these still reflect a minority of the
>> work we do; taking these into account still leaves almost all the
>> work we do going directly into the Open Source edition of LiveCode.
>>
>> In many ways, I feel that at the moment the best way to get the
>> resources required for maintaining and improving the Open Source
>> edition of LiveCode is actually to add Business-only features. Do you
>> have a better idea? For example, some people have suggested keeping
>> the source code on GitHub but charging people for access to Community
>> builds as a way to get revenue to support the Open Source edition.
>> What do you think?
>>
>
> I know there are a lot of people who use the Open Source edition of
> LiveCode on this mailing list, and I would appreciate your feedback.
>
>                                       Peter
>
> --
> Dr Peter Brett <peter.brett at livecode.com>
> LiveCode Open Source Team
>
> LiveCode 2016 Conference: https://livecode.com/edinburgh-2016/
>
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