Pi Digital wrote:
> Forgive me for saying but, except the bounty idea, wasn’t this the
> whole point of it going open source - so that the community would
> fix bugs themselves!!!!!
Personally, I try to avoid making claims about other people's internal
motivations. Since I'm not them, such information is unknowable to me.
I find it better to focus instead on what can be observed.
Maybe it's just a byproduct of having an audience in which such a large
segment got started decades ago, in a time when dev tools were mostly
proprietary, but I find the limited familiarity with what's happening in
the world outside of LC may contribute to these frequent kvetchfests.
In this second decade of the 21st century, with very few exceptions
nearly all infrastructure and dev tools are open source.
See the list of languages on the TIOBE list, and you can count on one
hand the few that remain there which are proprietary.
In this modern world, most devs won't even look at a dev tool unless
they know they can have access to its source. That doesn't matter to
consumers, which is why proprietary apps continue to thrive in consumer
segments. But devs demand open source.
So looking at this clear preference in the dev world, the choice to move
LC to open source seems far less sinister than your presumption implies:
Without open source, any dev tool is at serious risk of becoming inviable.
What may seem exotic to those more familiar with closed-source tools is
just how things work in open source. User contributions, bug bounties -
none of this is contentious in communities experienced in open source
process.
And to be clear, in terms of actual usage LC is very much an open source
project: More than 3/4 of its users are using the GPL-governed Community
Edition.
I wrote this yesterday, and I have no reason to mislead you, so please
consider it as a key to understanding LC's place in the modern world:
From an early-90s perspective, we can think of LC as a proprietary
product that offers an open source option for evangelism.
But in terms of actual usage in the here-and-now, LC is more
accurately an open source project in which a subset of the
development costs are subsidized by an optional proprietary license.
New world, new ways....
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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