[ANN] Release 9.0.0 DP-5

[Richard Gaskin]

Andre Garzia wrote:

 > The fact that these decisions are being taken, where the HQ appears
 > to be focusing more and more on business licensees feels like I am
 > being forced into such license. At this moment, I am starting to
 > wonder if there is any reason to be indy at all.

...or Community.

Finding the best mix of features for the the two proprietary licenses 
and the open source edition is a challenge.

I spent the last several days at the SoCal Linux Expo, and had good 
talks with team members from NginX, MariaDB, Nextcloud, and Ubuntu.

Those are among the strongest open source projects around, and all of 
them keep the projects going by offering paid services and software 
packages aimed at the enterprise audience.

On the surface it would appear that what they're doing is similar to 
what LiveCode is doing, and in some broad respects I suppose it is.

But I believe there are also at least two key differences:

- The for-fee-only offerings from those other companies are indeed
   specialized for larger customers, and the core free (libre and
    gratis) software is full-featured to the point of being best-of-
   breed.

- The communities surrounding those projects contribute a much larger
   percentage of the core free software.

With LiveCode, the company restricts a broader range of functionality to 
the proprietary editions, but they're also paying for a much larger 
percentage of programmer-hours going into the package.

Personally, I believe a healthy long-term balance would be more on par 
with those other projects, with more stuff shared across all editions 
and having that become possible because more of it comes from the community.

The tricky part is how to get from here to there.

Many of those projects are technologies that some of the world's biggest 
companies rely on, and many of those companies have full-time employees 
dedicated to contributing to those open source projects.  At Heroku, for 
example, they maintain two full-timers whose only job is to submit pull 
requests for postgreSQL, and Google pays for a lot of the development of 
Python.

The LiveCode world does not yet have a Google or Heroku in our community 
covering payroll for full-time engine developers.

So the question at hand for all of us, company and community alike, is:

    What is the best balance of free and non-free offerings
    that will not only grow the platform, but also keep the
    ship running in order to pursue that growth?

I don't have an easy answer on this.  But I believe it is a very 
important question.

And it may be harder to answer for this project than for others, for a 
great many reasons related to both the market the project serves and the 
complexity of delivering rich GUI authoring for so many platforms.

As just one comparison, my understanding is that the LiveCode code base 
is at least 30% larger than the code base for NginX.  Not only is LC a 
bigger project by that measure, but also arguably in terms of code 
complexity, because the touch-points for NGinX are limited to a 
relatively small number of OS APIs for networking and file I/O, but 
LiveCode needs those along with a vast number of broadly-varying GUI 
messaging APIs on top of that.

As I ponder this question, I recognize that while I'm not in a position 
to cover full-time salaries for LiveCode contributors, I can invest a 
certain percentage of my time each week to the project in light of the 
many practical benefits it offers my company.

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