Re: A small PR rant
Posted: Mon Jul 13, 2020 5:02 pm
Re "mixed system": the more common term is "dual licensed", referring to the user's choice of open source or proprietary license. Many popular projects are dual-licensed, including MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, NextCloud, and many more.
Some open source projects have strong corporate donations supporting them, like MySQL, postgeSQL, Python, LibreOffice, etc. Where corporate users deriving the greatest measurable value from a project also support it, an ecosystem can remain thriving.
More than 3/4 of LiveCode's audience is using the open source Community Edition. Qnd given the nature of the tool, while many corporations do use it internally and as such the open source license is sufficient, LC tends to be used for GUIs rather than infrastructure, which means proportionately more individual than corporate users than infrastructure tools.
And when we consider the nearly-unmatched scope of supported platforms, we can appreciate the expense side of the balance sheet as well.
Xojo was raised as an example, and it's a good comparison in this respect: while they offer "mobile", at this time that's iOS; the other 80% of the world using Android is informed "coming soon". I don't doubt that company's good intentions, and overall they seem to do pretty good work, but since "coming soon" has been the Android message for several years now it's clear that the scope of engineering costs needed to support this sort of platform coverage is non-trivial.
So on balance, for myself it doesn't seem inappropriate for a mostly-open-source company like LiveCode Ltd to include donations in the mix of revenue streams needed to support such an ambitious mission.
Some open source projects have strong corporate donations supporting them, like MySQL, postgeSQL, Python, LibreOffice, etc. Where corporate users deriving the greatest measurable value from a project also support it, an ecosystem can remain thriving.
More than 3/4 of LiveCode's audience is using the open source Community Edition. Qnd given the nature of the tool, while many corporations do use it internally and as such the open source license is sufficient, LC tends to be used for GUIs rather than infrastructure, which means proportionately more individual than corporate users than infrastructure tools.
And when we consider the nearly-unmatched scope of supported platforms, we can appreciate the expense side of the balance sheet as well.
Xojo was raised as an example, and it's a good comparison in this respect: while they offer "mobile", at this time that's iOS; the other 80% of the world using Android is informed "coming soon". I don't doubt that company's good intentions, and overall they seem to do pretty good work, but since "coming soon" has been the Android message for several years now it's clear that the scope of engineering costs needed to support this sort of platform coverage is non-trivial.
So on balance, for myself it doesn't seem inappropriate for a mostly-open-source company like LiveCode Ltd to include donations in the mix of revenue streams needed to support such an ambitious mission.