theux wrote:The company revenue is a killer.
Is it really? Remember that LiveCode has something that Xojo doesn't: an open source license option.
Check out the various use cases outlined in the first question on this page, many of which allow use of the open source Community Edition:
http://livecode.com/support/ask-a-question/
Educators, hobbyists, or anyone else who wants to share their code with the world can use the Community Edition, and anyone, even large corporations, who want to make tools for internal use can also use the Community Edition.
Some of my largest projects have been in that latter category. With any proprietary language they'd have to pay for a license, but with LiveCode they not only get to use it but they also get access to the source code, something many organizations require these days in order to commit to a new language.
So the only use cases affected by the license categories are those selling proprietary products. There needs to be some way to distinguish between small business and enterprise licenses, so the revenue division seems as good as any other. There are many different ways various orgs and agencies define "small business", often by number of employees but FWIW the $500,000 threshold is used by the US Labor Department for enforcement of some of its regulations that apply to small businesses.
If a company is able to generate more than half a million US$ in revenue from selling proprietary software made with LiveCode, it seems a modest requirement to share less than 4% of revenue with the company that wrote more than half of their product.
And since most pro devs are running one- to three-person shops, I'd wager relatively few would have to pay more than $500, which as Mark noted compares favorably to Xojo once you add up the various different platform options. Compare that to ToolBook, a Windows-only xTalk that sells for $2,795.
We might also compare that to Adobe Flash or Director, but for the life of me I can't figure out their licensing page. But one thing we do know is that Adobe products are now sold on a subscription basis, and because their products are proprietary that means that if you stop paying you lose access to your own work.
In contrast, even if you let your LiveCode Commercial license expire, you can continue to work with your code using the Community Edition; you would only need to renew your license while you're maintaining a proprietary work. Open source only governs when code is shared; what you do on your own hard drive is up to you.
The impact of open source is difficult to overstate. In the modern world, it's quite a challenge for any language to be taken seriously without at least an open source license option.
And in practical terms, for many categories of use where LiveCode is a great fit it reduces the developer costs to zero, while also providing access to the source code, so you can have confidence that bugs can be addressed, and the format you're committing to cannot die.