Infinite LiveCode - Message from CEO

[Richard Gaskin]

Robert Mann wrote:

 > As the situation stands, livecode drives the whole lot. So community
 > money contributors just support "blindly" livecode without any form
 > of representation. I wonder how long that can go on just like that.

Part of the role of a Community Manager is as a sort of ombudsman, an 
advocate for community interests in discussions with the core dev team. 
  Ask Peter or Kevin and they'll tell you that much of our regular 
meetings involve my advocacy for community interests.

One of the challenges is determining exactly what those community 
interests are.  This thread is a good example:  first there was a 
request for SFTP, the SMTP, then audio recording, and others.

To help turn myriad list posts into actionable information, LiveCode 
conducts several surveys of the user base each year.  But of course 
surveys are very limited in more ways than are worth listing here, so 
data collected there is augmented with many discussions both internal 
and with your Community advocate to help sort them out into priorities.

As with any software project, priorities are best served by attempting 
to gauge return on investment.  For example, if we have a hundreds posts 
for a feature but those posts are from a single user, even a feature 
less frequently discussed may take priority if it's determined to 
benefit a larger number of users.

Those priorities are also weighed against cost of delivery.  While we do 
occasionally see requests specific to one platform, most requests cover 
multiple platforms.  As we can see from the very small number of 
high-level scripting languages that offer integrated GUI support across 
seven platforms, this is evidently not a trivial task; few projects even 
attempt it at all.

Most of the Kickstarter goals have been delivered, the rest actively in 
development, and the Feature Exchange items have been in direct response 
to user requests.  In each case, participation in the fundraiser has 
always been completely optional for us - if we see something we like we 
can fund it, and even if we don't the Community Edition has and will 
continue to benefit from those, and everyone, contributor or not, has 
free and open access to it.

If there's a specific feature you had in mind, let's talk about it.  If 
a positive ROI for it can be determined it'll likely get done.

Many larger projects enjoy something we don't yet have:  outside 
companies paying full-time salaries for developers contributing to the 
software.  For example, Google and others pay several staffers to 
contribute to Python, and a friend at Heroku told me last night that he 
has a couple excellent engineers whose full-time job is submit pull 
requests for postgreSQL.

As the LiveCode projects grows we're seeing a bit of that, even if at a 
smaller scale than full-time staffers.  For example, David Simpson of 
.Com Solutions needed some specific clipboard enhancements, so he 
contacted the team, got a quote he found reasonable, and covered the 
development cost.  Those enhancements are now in all LiveCode editions, 
including the Community Edition (thank you David!).

What we all want to avoid is being another TideSDK.  That was an open 
source project where Appcellerator spun out their desktop platforms so 
they could focus their considerable investment on just two (iOS and 
Android).  The desktop project deployed to Mac, Windows, and Linux, and 
was released under permissive license so it was fully dependent on 
donations alone.  A couple years ago one of their blog posts noted that 
they'd received less than $600 in donations for the entirety of that 
year.  The project has since died for lack of funding.

The mix of development options LiveCode has offered to date represent 
their best effort at measuring community interest balanced with ROI.

But like any process, there's always room for refinement.

So like I said, if there's a specific feature you want let's discuss it 
and see how we can put together the resources to make it happen.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  LiveCode Community Liaison
  richard at livecode.org