Revenue and the Open Source edition

[Peter M. Brigham]

On May 2, 2016, at 10:38 AM, Earthednet-wp wrote:

> Folks,
> Richmond, thanks for your forthright posts and entertaining metaphors!
> 
> Re fees, licenses, etc, I am a retired prof who spent a lot of years programming for research, then to support student learning in a large oceanography class. My son is an elementary teacher who teaches Lego robotics. It seems to me that a difficult, but ripe local market is being plumbed by Richmond. But, on a larger scale, I find teachers are easily put off by what appears to be complicated, time consuming new resources. They are extremely busy and collapse in a heap during their summer time off, unless they are running summer classes and "camps" (like my son is) to pay the bills. It seems to me that Richmond, so creative, is in a position to expand his business model to include teachers who want to teach basic programming, with a kid oriented approach. Perhaps to control dinosaur robots, or some such. I know there's scratch and all the Arduino resources, but perhaps there is a niche for livecode. But, bottom line, teachers need to get sucked in with a complete plug and play resource that will excite kids and require very little up front time. Maybe there would be an income stream? Online support, code help?? 

Back in the day, Apple marketed heavily to the teaching/educational market, and the result was a generation of kids who grew up using Macs. IMO, Edinburgh would do well to try to get LC used by as many teachers at the middle school and high school level as possible (and why not grade school too?) -- the multiplier effect here would be enormous. I would think that a special pricing scheme for educators would be an extremely good investment in the long run, even if there were scanty short-run returns.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com