Livecode Standard Plan

[matgarage]

Hello everyone,
What will happen to my “LiveCode Standard Plan,” which I signed up for through a promotional offer that guaranteed me the same rate: €111.78 per year?

[Emily-Elizabeth]

Just a little guessing, but I think because LiveCode Ltd is killing off LiveCode and going with LiveCode Create, you might need to contact them to see if they can help you out. The thing that keeps me away from LiveCode Create is the kill-switch that's programmed in.

[richmond62]

I don't think any of those 'lifetime' guarantees have ever been honoured.

[matgarage]

To be honest, I had a feeling this would happen.
I won’t be switching to the new model, which, in my view, has lost its way.
This forced change is holding hostage everyone who built a business on the previous business model.

I’ll have to give up my dreams of ever commercializing my software. Maybe that’s better for the tech industry as a whole

Thanks to the work to maintain open source with XTalk and Emily-Elisabeth’s work on porting it to Apple Silicon, we’ll be able to keep creating great code for free.
In a virtuous cycle, perhaps the community will be able to pool its expertise to keep these new projects alive and evolving for many years to come.

Good ideas never die.

[richmond62]

OXT is open and welcoming, so come on in the water's warm.

The ONLY snag is that, as Open Source software, you'll have to make your stacks available to anyone who requests them.

[matgarage]

I’m old enough to feel nostalgic for freeware and shareware.
Once I’ve swallowed the bitter pill of broken promises, I might console myself by making my projects available to everyone.
It’s hard to give up on your dreams

[dunbarx]

I guess I am still not clear on one thing. Money aside, do I understand that "LC Classic", that is, being able to work the "old" way instead of the "Create" way, will one day NOT be included within the Create program? that in the near future only Create will be available?

Um, it is old-fashioned, but perfectly permissible to include a question mark in the middle of an english sentence

It seems odd to me that LC Ltd. has found a paradigm where Create is the only available tool. I say this because, perhaps mistakenly, I do not believe that I (or anyone) could build some of the stacks I have with a drag-and-drop construct alone. That is not to say that Create could not give a mighty head start, sailing past the typical tedious construction of the basic elements of a stack, and even write a substantial code foundation.

But to complete a complex project I need classic. No AI could write all the code that drives any of my principal stacks. And if even one line cannot so be magically constructed, then classic, for that one line, is required.

Am I wrong?

Craig

[Emily-Elizabeth]

Thanks to the work to maintain open source with XTalk and Emily-Elisabeth’s work on porting it to Apple Silicon, we’ll be able to keep creating great code for free.

As Richmond mentioned, there is also OpenXTalk, which is further ahead then HyperXTalk.

[richmond62]

No, Craig, I don't think you are wrong.

But I do think a few other things:

1. LiveCode (which started our being called Runtime Revolution) was, at one time, revolutionary insofar as it vastly improved on MetaCard, which was, in turn, a UNIX clone of HyperCard.

2. As in the case of all revolutions ever, those revolutionaries grew 'old' and complacent, and lost touch with what was revolutionary about their revolution.

3. The revolutionaries replaced what was revolutionary about their product with a need to emulate other products and follow fashion.

4. About 12 years ago I stopped praising the revolutionaries all the time and started pointing out a tendency I noticed that was, as far as I was concerned, working against the maintenance of revolutionary fervour: the start of an obsession to implement new features (possibly to keep up with the people across the border) instead on focussing on sorting out existing bugs and reinforcing existing strengths. I made myself fairly unpopular amongst the "party faithful".

5. Where there was a need to reinforce existing strengths, the users had to focus on 'work-arounds' as the centre really couldn't be bothered to provide ways inwith the 'ideology' as they were too focussed on implementing the next funky feature.

6. LiveCode dug themselves a hole with their appeals for financial help based on promises and roadmaps which they did not subsequently fulfill; thereby losing the trust of a significant chunk of their installed base.

7. Having dug themselves several large holes, instead of addressing them for what they were, LC attempted to distract the remaining installed base by pulling a rabbit out of a hat: Create.

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About 14 years ago I was offered a "hi-tech" package for my EFL school here in Bulgaria. This would have involved an outlay of about 15,000 Euros for 'smart' boards, Windows-based computers, various other funky tech, data-projectors, and so forth.

Several people I know, running similar operations to mine DID invest in these packages and rapidly found out a few things:

1. To use these 'smart' boards and so on required:

1.1. Significant, ongoing investment in further software packages.

1.2. Significant "downtime" while staff were being trained to use the equipment and software.

Of course, all the time they were discovering this, parents were paying the same amount of money they had paid previously for their kiddos to learn English.

2. Most of these EFL schools significantly increased their fees: thereby losing as much as 75% of their pupils.

I "trundled happily on" with my second-hand computers running Xubuntu Linux and software (i.e. LC standalones) I cooked up at no cost to myself beyond a few hours a week and an increased coffee intake.

Most of those, other EFL operations are either:

1. Closed.

2. Functioning but not using all that stuff they invested such a lot of money in.

Some of those EFL operations, being far larger than my "one horse town" are still paying off lones for stuff they don't use.

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At present I "pop out" a new package for my school about once a month using LC 9.6.3 Open Source, and I use OXT for my 'dead language' stuff (Devawriter, Sheba-Makeda, Pismo, Grendel). The ONLY reason I do NOT use the Free (Linux only) version of RunRev 2.1 given out by Oracle about 20 years ago is that it can only build for 32-bit Linux.

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Oddly enough the children who attend my school:

1. Love it.

2. Learn English fairly quickly with the same tech or lack of it that I started with 22 years ago.

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No parent has EVER complained because I don't employ smart-boards, commercial software, and smoke and mirrors. And no parent has EVER complained that when I put the fees up I base the increase on the price increase of a kilogram of cheese at my local supermarket (i.e. a normal price increase).

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I am well aware that if I completely 're-tooled' and changed my teaching methodology I'd be closing down my school within 6 months.

But the people at LiveCode having 'found' something that people liked a lot, having decided to ride roughshod over the opinions of their installed base in so many ways

(especially putting their incomplete re-tool behind a pay wall)

and, imagine if I "somehow' jigged things so that if any of my pupils wanted to help their friends with the English they had learnt at my school they would have to pay me: and, even if they stopped coming to my school they were not allowed to help their friends with English at all.

that, as far as I can see they are getting what they deserve.

[FourthWorld]

I’m old enough to feel nostalgic for freeware and shareware.
Once I’ve swallowed the bitter pill of broken promises, I might console myself by making my projects available to everyone.
It’s hard to give up on your dreams

I suspect you and I are of similar age, which more or less answers the rest of all this.

Your post mentioned an annual fee, so any considerations related to a "lifetime" license would not apply. Beyond that, the difference between an inferred "promise" and an aspiration is subjective, and moreover, not useful for seeking results. After all, we're here to find solutions, aren't we?

Let's not give up on dreams just yet.

Let's step up to look at the bigger picture to see what I'm getting at:

Apple killed HyperCard decades ago. Allegiant was unable to port the SuperCard engine to Windows affordably around that same time. Oracle had already nixed Media Objects. Spinnaker Plus was taken out to pasture the year before. Sybase gave up on Gain Momentum as well, selling it off to a minor player at what one can reasonably assume was a net loss. Even the well-funded Asymmetrix was struggling with Toolbook, and sold it off a few years later.

See a pattern?

The boldest audacity of Crossworlds/RunRev/LiveCode was daring to give us all another quarter century with a language family the rest of the world simply doesn't find as exciting in today's vast landscape.

The heart wants what the heart wants, the world's and our own. We can make even reasonable arguments favoring the xTalk Way, but who in 2026 will take time away from crafting software with tools they love to listen?

A few, yes, and for my tastes I believe they would be well rewarded (I have yet to see another tool that makes apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux as productively). But my beliefs do not drive the world.

There's a language history thing at the heart of why xTalks gave way to conventions common among newer scripting languages, showing us that the biggest underlying change was the industry shift from Pascal to C.

And personally, as much as I enjoy my acquired familiarity with xTalks, I have to admit the strongest productivity benefits aren't from the syntax at all, but how the overall system offers late binding (edit while you run, reducing the difference between development and runtime) and having GUI objects as core language features (everything else treats use interface as an afterthought, as though it never occurred to the language designer that folks may want to make an app with it).

But those are apparently nuances too subtle for any of the xTalk vendors to have put them front and center in their marketing, instead focusing on a syntax from another time (which could be more easily replaced with something like JavaScript while still retaining the unique benefits of the xTalk Way, but that's another thread, and at this point an irrelevant one).

So, here we are, in a 2026 where software continues to eat the world, but Pascal-flavored scripting tools already died ages ago, with one survivor struggling for a place at the banquet table.

So we descendants of the Pascal tribe are at an evolutionary crossroad, with several options available:

- LC Ltd has offered to discuss legacy use cases with legacy customers to see what can be done at they pivot from the struggling indy market to focus on the enterprise. Some here have use cases that require no licencing change and have saved money, like DunbarX has reported for his internally used tooling. Some others may find a good fit with the new direction, others not.

- Open source requires a shift in business plan, but any business plan not already lucrative under propriety license all these years later may benefit from a shift in thinking anyway.

- If neither the propriety license nor open source works for your use case, you're left with everything else the entire world uses to profitably produce and publish software.

--

I could spend my days lamenting the end of Joy Division, and wondering whether I'll ever see a new studio album from New Order.

But I still enjoy New Order's music, and can catch them on tour now and then as schedule permits, and all the while the world continues to produce so much great music.

https://youtu.be/MEl0Chq36lc

[richmond62]

There's a language history thing at the heart of why xTalks gave way to conventions common among newer scripting languages

Not much different, I suppose, than why flared jeans were fashionable in the 1970s, and they are not at the moment.

But I still enjoy New Order's music

Indeed: although it sounds to me extremely similar to some things by Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.

[dunbarx]

Richard.

But I still enjoy New Order's music, and can catch them on tour now and then as schedule permits, and all the while the world continues to produce so much great music.

I am famous for, and smug about my popular music tastes, which are frozen in the decade or so from 1963 to 1975 or so. Blinkers on my ears, you see. I never heard of New Order, so I listened to a couple of their songs.

Nope.

On another note, will there be a "standard", "classic", whatever option in Create going forward?

Craig

[richmond62]

Writing as a child of the late 1970s British Rockabilly revival there is no obvious indication that with Create we can get away with antiseptic cream in our hair because we cannot afford Brylcreem.

But there is always the risk of 'Rockabilly' being swept away by Punk Rock, so no more worries about greasy muck in one's hair.

[FourthWorld]

On another note, will there be a "standard", "classic", whatever option in Create going forward?

Classic IDE is still available as an option in Create, and I can't imagine any benefit in adding the additional expense of somehow purging it later on.

I can see how it might become unsupported at some point when the road, but working overtime to prevent its use wouldn't seem like a good use of development time.

[dunbarx]

Richard.

Am I somehow disingenuous in my thinking that only classic can do anything, never mind that Create can do lots of things?

Craig