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I'm one of the kickstart backers and I'm OK with this move. In the end of the day, what we all want is the language and its ecosystem to be healthy so we can us

I'm one of the kickstart backers and I'm OK with this move. In the end of the day, what we all want is the language and its ecosystem to be healthy so we can use it to develop our applications. After eight years of the FOSS version, very few users contributed to the codebase, and many of the customers moved to the FOSS version. LiveCode is still a business, it needs to pay its staff. I've seen that most of the backers are actually onboard with this move. Many of us have been using this language for more than 20 years, we'd rather pay for our licenses and have a good product, than have a FOSS version that no one is working on. Keeping a non-VC-backed programming language company alive is not a trivial job. FOSS is not the way towards sustainability for some companies.

coolestuk 5y ago
I also donated to the Livecode open source project. I just had a look at the Kickstarter programme. I tallied up all the contributions of those who received at least a license to the commercial product in the days after the Kickstarter ended. Of the £493,795 raised, fully £368,285 of that donated was returned as commercial licenses to those who donated. Those who donated in return for no immediate reward (about 0.2% of the total sum donated) got 8 years of free enhancements to the open source version. And those who have that open source version installed still get to use it ad infinitum (even if they were not contributors to the Kickstarter). There's no need to pay for any license unless features added in future are things they feel meet some need. I've funded other projects where I never even got a viable product, never mind one that was actively developed for nearly a decade.
PaulMcClernan 5y ago
It was quite annoying that the Community didn't get more involved in improving the open source version, but I think blaming the community for that isn't entirely fair either. LC didn't seem to make very much of an effort to get the Community to become involved. Most LC Scripters don't even know how to use GitHub, they would need to do lots of encouragement and hand-holding to get more users involved. To their credit, they did hold my hand a bit as I started to use GitHub specifically in order to contribute. They have to be very careful about what they merge into the code base, which can make it into a difficult process just to correct spelling errors in the integrated docs! More often than not though, it felt like LC Ltd. didn't even want people to know that the free open source edition existed! I think the way both LC ltd and their community, which was always very helpful to other users, handled OS was misguided. In my opinion, they should've gone after certain markets in education and displaced users of other xTalk languages like a clan of honey badgers, and gotten their avid user base to help them do that too! I don't want to harp on them too much because they're a small company and a great bunch of friendly, hard working people that have a huge set of tasks to do, and of course they have bills to pay and mouths to feed. After 8 years, and *SEVERAL FUNDING CAMPAIGNS, they've left behind a very nice, refactored, base of code, that includes a new middle layer language (LiveCode Builder) for adding new libraries and GUI widgets, and can build apps for all major current platforms except for new Apple Silicon and Linux Arm (although there exists several Raspberry Pi builds, none of those builds are up to date). Anyone interested can improve and build onto a fork of that GPL3 code base right now. For what it's worth there are a few people, myself included, that want to keep working on it. Could be the start if something beautiful, a standardized OpenXtalk Script, the kind that could've filled JavaScript's role before JavaScript existed! People should stop complaining about it, and start doing something about it! Most of it is bootstrapped so you only need to know LCS or maybe similar xTalk (SuperCard, SenseTalk, etc.) to work on that yourselves! My fork(s) is several commits ahead of the last open source version from LC, but people are free to fork the archived version if they'd like: https://github.com/PaulMcClernan/LiveCodeCommunity-IDE-DontPanicEdition https://github.com/PaulMcClernan/LiveCodeCommunity-IDE-DontP...

coolestuk 5y ago

I also donated to the Livecode open source project. I just had a look at the Kickstarter programme. I tallied up all the contributions of those who received at least a license to the commercial product in the days after the Kickstarter ended. Of the £493,795 raised, fully £368,285 of that donated was returned as commercial licenses to those who donated. Those who donated in return for no immediate reward (about 0.2% of the total sum donated) got 8 years of free enhancements to the open source version. And those who have that open source version installed still get to use it ad infinitum (even if they were not contributors to the Kickstarter). There's no need to pay for any license unless features added in future are things they feel meet some need. I've funded other projects where I never even got a viable product, never mind one that was actively developed for nearly a decade.

PaulMcClernan 5y ago

It was quite annoying that the Community didn't get more involved in improving the open source version, but I think blaming the community for that isn't entirely fair either. LC didn't seem to make very much of an effort to get the Community to become involved. Most LC Scripters don't even know how to use GitHub, they would need to do lots of encouragement and hand-holding to get more users involved. To their credit, they did hold my hand a bit as I started to use GitHub specifically in order to contribute. They have to be very careful about what they merge into the code base, which can make it into a difficult process just to correct spelling errors in the integrated docs! More often than not though, it felt like LC Ltd. didn't even want people to know that the free open source edition existed! I think the way both LC ltd and their community, which was always very helpful to other users, handled OS was misguided. In my opinion, they should've gone after certain markets in education and displaced users of other xTalk languages like a clan of honey badgers, and gotten their avid user base to help them do that too! I don't want to harp on them too much because they're a small company and a great bunch of friendly, hard working people that have a huge set of tasks to do, and of course they have bills to pay and mouths to feed. After 8 years, and *SEVERAL FUNDING CAMPAIGNS, they've left behind a very nice, refactored, base of code, that includes a new middle layer language (LiveCode Builder) for adding new libraries and GUI widgets, and can build apps for all major current platforms except for new Apple Silicon and Linux Arm (although there exists several Raspberry Pi builds, none of those builds are up to date). Anyone interested can improve and build onto a fork of that GPL3 code base right now. For what it's worth there are a few people, myself included, that want to keep working on it. Could be the start if something beautiful, a standardized OpenXtalk Script, the kind that could've filled JavaScript's role before JavaScript existed! People should stop complaining about it, and start doing something about it! Most of it is bootstrapped so you only need to know LCS or maybe similar xTalk (SuperCard, SenseTalk, etc.) to work on that yourselves! My fork(s) is several commits ahead of the last open source version from LC, but people are free to fork the archived version if they'd like: https://github.com/PaulMcClernan/LiveCodeCommunity-IDE-DontPanicEdition https://github.com/PaulMcClernan/LiveCodeCommunity-IDE-DontP...