Unclear licenses

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theux
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Unclear licenses

Post by theux » Fri Sep 06, 2013 5:01 am

Hey guys,

I just found LiveCode and I'm finding it too good to be true :-). The only sad thing I found is that there is no Native OSX UI :cry: But I read that you are working on it!

I'm quite confused with your LC versions. Could you please clarify that? For example the LC community. I understood that I cannot release an app on Apple store using the community version. But can I sell my closed standalone mac app from my website?

Another thing, do you have a comparison table between community vs commercial? I know that RR used kickstarter to get money to make an open source version of LC, but you still have commercial version of it. And for what I see, the commercial version has many more features than the open sourced one. Don't get me wrong here, I'm just trying to understand this new universe.

Cheers.

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Re: Unclear licenses

Post by FourthWorld » Fri Sep 06, 2013 6:34 am

What features do you see in the commercial version that aren't in the open source version?
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andrewferguson
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Re: Unclear licenses

Post by andrewferguson » Fri Sep 06, 2013 8:27 am

theux wrote:Another thing, do you have a comparison table between community vs commercial?
Hi,
See here: http://livecode.com/support/ask-a-question/

The first link should be what you are looking for. "Can you give me some examples of where I do and don’t need a commercial license?"

Andrew

theux
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Re: Unclear licenses

Post by theux » Fri Sep 06, 2013 8:43 am

Thank you. So, the license is valid per one year. It means that if I want to keep the commercial license, I have to pay $500 every year, is that right?

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Re: Unclear licenses

Post by FourthWorld » Fri Sep 06, 2013 3:25 pm

Yes, the new pricing is an annual subscription that includes commercial licenses for all platforms LC supports: Mac, Win, Linux, iOS, Android, and Server. For those of us who enjoyed all those platforms and kept up with current versions, this pricing reflects a significant savings over earlier options.

As for features, Commercial and Community both use the same code base and support the same features, with just one exception: the ability to protect source code through encryption via stack passwords. While very valuable for commercial proprietary products made with LiveCode, it's logically incompatible with the GPL open source license that governs the Community edition, since the GPL requires freely sharing the source code for any apps distributed under that license (see the Four Freedoms from which the GPL is derived: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freed ... Definition ).

Similarly, the requirement of a Commercial license to distribute in Apple's app store derives from logical incompatibility with the GPL, because the GPL grants the freedom of unlimited distribution, but Apple's app store policies limit the number of installs of an app to a certain number (5?) of devices for a given account.
Richard Gaskin
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theux
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Re: Unclear licenses

Post by theux » Fri Sep 06, 2013 4:37 pm

Thanks FourthWorld for your explanation.

Just to be clear. What happen if you don't renew your license? Do you 'lose' all your work? I mean, you cannot deploy and maintain anymore commercial apps. Is that right?

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Re: Unclear licenses

Post by FourthWorld » Fri Sep 06, 2013 4:52 pm

No, you do not "lose all your work". Your stack files will remain intact and ready for continued development whenever you wish to resume your license for the IDE. Any standalones built during your license period will continue to run without expiration.
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sritcp
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Re: Unclear licenses

Post by sritcp » Thu Oct 24, 2013 11:29 pm

So, the bottom line is that you cannot make and distribute (for instance) an iPad app with the Community Edition.
Thanks, Richard, for clarifying that.
RunRev has one of the worst websites I have ever visited. Nowhere could I find a clear, explicit statement that you can't use the Community Edition to develop iOS apps.

This means people like me who are not professional developers (and for whom $500 a year is an unrecoverable expense) are shut out the LiveCode universe.
I saw on the Apple event the other day that iPad accounts for 81% of the tablet traffic. Reason enough for RunRev to obfuscate on this issue, I guess.

Sad for all of us, small timers :(

Best wishes,
Sri.

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Re: Unclear licenses

Post by FourthWorld » Thu Oct 24, 2013 11:45 pm

sritcp wrote:RunRev has one of the worst websites I have ever visited. Nowhere could I find a clear, explicit statement that you can't use the Community Edition to develop iOS apps.
See the FAQ, first question, in the Support link at LiveCode.com:
http://livecode.com/support/ask-a-question/
I saw on the Apple event the other day that iPad accounts for 81% of the tablet traffic.
In the US and Canada, and according to one ad vendor, Chikita. And even if there wasn't as much controversy around Chikita's numbers as there frequently is, the tablet market is tiny compared to phones, and across both Android leads almost three-to-one.

And then there's the desktop, which even now, some seven years into the so-called "post-PC era", still accounts for three-fourths of all Internet traffic.

LiveCode can deploy to all of them: Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and servers. It's only iOS that prohibits GPL-governed apps, and not because of RunRev's policies, but Apple's.
Richard Gaskin
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