sefrojones wrote:I am not implying classism, I am implying that your lifetime license has perhaps insulated you a bit from the feelings/concerns that are being expressed by the rest of the community.
You can rest assured that's not the case. The contribution I made to the Kickstarter campaign for my lifetime license was just a downpayment for me; I continue to donate thousands of dollars worth of otherwise-billable time to community efforts in this volunteer role, so for me it's not merely a significant expense, but an ongoing one.
Why would I choose do that?
It might be madness, but my accountant and I agree that it's a good investment in the interest of my company and the companies I work with.
Before LiveCode went open source I spent considerable time exploring alternatives. I've been in the business long enough to have amassed a hard drive filled in part with data in proprietary formats I can no longer use either because I switch OSes every few years or because the vendor is no longer in business.
There are some great tools out there, but I haven't found one that does as much for the work I do as LiveCode delivers.
My volunteer work to help them find more effective ways to engage with their community isn't charity or altruism. It's just business, helping to grow an ecosystem around a toolkit that provides unmatched ROI for the companies I serve.
My initial concerns of a crippled community version moving forward have been addressed and I will continue from here on out using Community version for my personal projects.
Please keep in mind that whether it's me or someone else in the future, anyone in the role of Community Manager has advocacy of community concerns as their primary objective. Open source is a big deal and getting bigger every year, and I think the value of the Community Edition is far from fully appreciated by any of us. I'm at your service for anything I can do to help further the vision the Community Edition as a powerful, exciting toolkit for delivering great software.
The subscription issue though, seems to still be a major sticking point with a lot of the users in this thread, as well as a few other complaints not raised in my original (inflammatory) post, or addressed by Kevin in his initial responses.
Kevin has said he'd prefer to just give everything away if he could, but like the rest of us he realizes that he needs to balance that desire with the practical need to keep the joint running so the mission remains viable.
Finding the right mix of revenue streams is a tough balancing act for any company, and we see more fluctuation in pricing models with LiveCode and Xojo and others because it's even more difficult when the market is as small as the one for dev tools.
While the subscription model has been a sticking point for some, when we look at the audience as a whole it's not a large percentage (even if it's a disporportionately vocal one <g>). Most devs who need a Commercial license have historically renewed annually anyway, so the practical impact on most business users is very small. Remember that the company does several surveys a year, is regularly in touch with a wide range of developers, and reads more of the posts here and on the use-livecode list than you might think. They don't always make perfect decisions, but they at least try to make informed decisions.
Someone a while back in this thread characterized the current pricing situation as ideal for no one. I'd agree with that, and I'd wager Kevin would too. I'd like to see lower prices, Kevin would prefer they be even lower, but the cost to produce the software just won't let it get much lower than it is.
Over time we may be able to see LiveCode Builder take on a new role on collaborative development for the platform, in which what we think of as the "dev team" becomes potentially as large as the number of people who can do reasonable decent scripting in a tool as easy as LiveCode. I'd like to believe that could be a billion people, but I'd be happy if it were as small as a million.
Exactly how the future plays out is anyone's guess, but I think LiveCode offers something uniquely valuable to the world of programming languages, and I think the Community Edition is perhaps the most interest part of that future.
Thee's something about truly free software that's hard to describe but very compelling, almost enchanting. You use Ubuntu, so maybe you've had that moment when you're happily doing whatever we do with our computers and suddently it dawns on you that you're using an operating system made by people just like you. They had an itch, they scratched it, and out came an OS. And a really good one. I like a lot of software, but I often find that free-as-in-libre software just feels more fun. Like Woz once said, "All the best people in life seem to like Linux."
I'd like to say thank you for your commitment and dedication as Community Manager(liaison?), I'm sure it's a mostly thankless job.
Thanks, Sefro. To be honest, I think I've had more people express appreciation for my work as CM than anything I've done yet merits. I've had some very nice emails and comments like yours, but I have a vision for what a free and open LiveCode can do in the world that's so much bigger than anything we've seen yet that I'm not at all happy with the snail's pace of my modest contributions. All in good time, I suppose. Like the core dev team, I need to balance my own goals for LiveCode Community with the need to cover my expenses as we go, so I try to be patient.
My meeting with Kevin last week touched on some organizational things that may allow us to speed up some initiatives. Early days still, but we're doing what we can to build a thriving open source community.
Honestly, I think there are plenty of publicly available learning resources that are more than sufficient to get acquainted with LiveCode
You've been a source of good ideas many times, so if you discover opportunities to expand public learning resources please feel free to suggest them in the Learning Resources section of the Open Source forums here:
http://forums.livecode.com/viewforum.php?f=83