sefrojones wrote:FourthWorld wrote:
What did the authors of those components say when you asked them if could deliver a version of their plugin that's compatible with LiveCode Community Edition?
This is ignoring the question entirely.
Very much the opposite: I believe the question has merit in a community with a long familiarity with proprietary-only licensing now slowly coming to appreciate the implications of having an open source option as well. I'm trying to address it as directly as possible by distinguishing it from the many other concerns that have cropped up in this thread.
This thread has become rather sprawling, with different people describing various concerns, so it's easy to see how the many very different issues at play here become overlapped.
When you wrote:
sefrojones wrote:kevinmiller wrote: Or you can choose to buy a commercial version from us with a commercial widget.
This makes much more sense. If the new functionality is based around commercial widgets, then this seems like a very fair way to differentiate between the versions and add value for your business customers, while still maintaining a powerful open-source platform for the rest of the community. I apologize for the sensationalist nature of the original post here, it was a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that "features" were beginning to be left out of the open-source version.
You have put my fears to rest.
--Sefro
...I took that to mean that you felt the concerns that prompted you to start this thread were well addressed.
Hopefully all of the different issues that have come up here since can also be worked through to the same level of satisfaction.
I believe we can address this specific question most directly by focusing squarely on the issue as expressed: a dual-licensed product in which some third-party vendors make single-licensed add-ons.
The concern you expressed here is related but different:
It seems that a major sticking point with more than a few users who have commented in this thread is this : There is no way to own LiveCode anymore, at best it can only be rented.
Let me see if I can convey my own thoughts on how the two tie together:
This thread began with concerns specific to a recent email from Kevin, but the subscription model isn't new. It's been in place for years, ever since the Community Edition premiered.
I would assume that co-occurence is no accident, as it is the Community Edition that makes LiveCode's adoption of the growing trend across the industry toward a subscription model very different from most others, much more user-friendly.
Even the price change isn't all that new for most of us: $499 is the price it was before last year's experiment with a lower monthly option, and the price I paid for annual renewals back in the late '90s when I got started with this engine, after paying an initial licensing fee of $995. It may seem new to those who've been taking advantage of their frequent promotional pricing, such as the one they're currently offering.
Like Adobe, Xojo, Asymetrix, and other dev tool vendors, LiveCode has experimented with many different pricing models over the years, and as with each of those vendors some have been more well recieved than others.
I would love to live in a world in which features and quality only increase while pricing only decreases, but as Kevin said that doesn't reflect the world we live in.
LiveCode is very expensive to produce. With a rich feature set enjoyed across seven platforms, it's far more expensive to make than most consumer software. But being a developer tool, the total addressable market is a slender fraction of what most consumer software can aim for. This is an inherent challenge for all makers of developer tools.
Those of us who rely on their technology for our businesses want them to remain viable so we can continue to realize value from their work. So while we may not prefer a given change to their pricing, as long as it can be covered by our business revenue it's at least acceptable.
Kevin didn't invent subscription models for software; if anything he's a late adopter. Not only have industry leaders like Adobe made this change long ago, but some of LiveCode's own customers use subscription models for the works they produce with LiveCode. Whether we prefer them or not, these models have a well demonstrated history of making revenue streams more predictable in a way that benefits planning.
As common as subscription models have become, LiveCode goes further in offering something few others do: a Community Edition, freely available all the way down to the source, generously offered to all 7 billion people on the planet at no cost, and under a license that explicitly guarantees everyone the freedom to modify it in anyway they like and share those modifications with everyone.
With most subscription software, when your subscription ends you lose access to your own work.
With LiveCode, when your subscription ends your work lives forever under a Community Edition where even the engine's source is publicly available to all. As long as compilers exist it can never die.
True, if you want to run a business specifically distributing proprietary software, you'll need a proprietary license for that. But anyone starting a business will very quickly discover that having 90% of their code written for $499 a year is among the smallest expenses on their balance sheet, and often the one that delivers the highest ROI.
Most business owners had been renewing annually anyway to take advantage of newer engines for their own products, so for the majority of Commercial licensees there's been no practical change at all.
I must admit a difficulty in understanding the reluctance to embrace the Community Edition as the powerful option it is. In my apparently limited thinking, to me the bottom line seems quite clearly the bottom line: anyone who truly needs a Commercial license should find it an affordable business expense, and anyone who doesn't have a business that can produce at least $499 a year probably doesn't need a Commercial license.
There are many ways to monetize software, even more when aiming as low as <$499. And there's tremendous value in contributing to the world's knowledge through free and open software.
All this leaves us with the relatatively slender edge case Lagi Pittas raised: the developer who has chosen to invest in proprietary third-party add-ons, but may want to use LiveCode Community Edition and finds that some of those third-party vendors don't have a dual-license strategy in place.
That's a business decision, for each side, customer and vendor. As buyers we can choose proprietary-only add-ons when they fully address our needs, or we can choose dual-licensed add-ons when they may be a better fit, or we can write our own.
These sorts of business decisions aren't unique to LiveCode, and as the role of FOSS continues to grow ever larger across our industry they'll become increasingly common.
It definitely merits discussion, and I hope some of the folks with aspirations of making profitable add-ons may chime in here, as their views lie at the heart of Lagi Pittas' question.
I understand that you have a lifetime license and as such, these changes don't effect you, but most of us do not have that luxury.
Respectfully, Sefro, the implied classism there is inapproriate; presumption is best avoided. I find most people have far more in common than they have differences; let's let our common interests bring us together, and leave imagined differences at the door.
My LiveCode license is not a luxury. It is a business investment.
Money doesn't fall from any tree in my neighborhood; I work for it like most others I know, and I spend it with the same reasonable prudence needed to stay in business for a couple decades.
LiveCode is like computers, office rent, or any other business expense, evaluated in terms of the ROI it will deliver. For my business needs, having so much of my code written for me by people with a much higher IQ than mine for less than a day's cost of a single engineer's time is an easy evaluation to make.
But that's because I'm running a business.
If someone enjoys LiveCode and isn't running a business based around distribution of proprietary software, they very literally have no business requiring a Commercial license.
And if they are running a business, $499/yr is a shockingly low-cost way to be able to leverage 800,000 lines of high-quality code.
Back to Lagi Pittas' concern:
It may be worth noting that the GPL is a distribution license, and Kevin has explicitly reminded us that proprietary IDE plugins can indeed be used with the Community Edition.
Peter Haworth asked about this on the use-livecode list, and his own tools are made with the Commercial Edition which grants him the right to choose other licensing terms than GPL when distributing his plugins, even if the recipient is using them within the GPL-governed Community Edition.
Given that script encryption is available in Commercial only, this means such plugins will be source-available, if not open source per se. But frankly, source-available is the minimum I need anyway for any code I rely on from others, since inevitably I'll need to modify it from time to time.
Mats Wilstrand has gone even further, deploying his rTree and other plugins fully dual-licensed. I believe other developers offer dual-licensed plugins as well. I have some GPL-governed plugins in the works myself.
Unlike other communities that have a healthy third-party ecosystem, like Drupal and Wordpress, ours has relatively little experience with the value of open source.
With those two projects, things are a bit simpler in one regard: neither offers a proprietary option, so all themes, plugins, and other add-ons must be GPL to comply with the copyright requirements.
Being dual-licensed gives third-party developers making add-ons for LiveCode more options. Anyone using the GPL-governed Community Edition can distribute under GPL only, but those using Commercial can choose from a wide range of license options for their IDE plugins.
Distributable libraries are another matter, since distribution is when the GPL comes into play.
But given the difficult business case for attempting profitable plugins for any dev tool (I know it well; that's how I started my company), it may be that dual-licensing will be seen as a good fit for a growing number of add-ons over time.
I look forward to comments from third-party plugin authors on this.
