I can't say this surprises me. I didn't expect the open source offering to do anything but cut into the bottom line. But certainty isn't achieved until something is tried and actual results obtained. One of the good things about having the code source was that there have been times when I've wanted to suggest an enhancement and could look through the code myself to see what would be required to bring it about. If it required only a small change I could make that suggestion and the enhancement was easy to make.
Over the years I've watched on general programming forums as whenever HyperCard was brought up there was gushing praise for what it was. Whenever someone then posted about LiveCode in this context, the gushing praise turned to irrational hostility. Pointing out that LC was cross-platform beyond their wildest dreams, massively more capable than HyperCard, and free to use made no difference to their irrational hostility -- better was worse. There you had a group of programmers who supposedly loved what HyperCard could do, but they only loved that concept as a historical artefact, not as a tool available to people now. No wonder none of them got interested in the open source code. Ironically the LC source can remain up on Github and as the past 8 years have shown it's exceedingly unlikely that the advocates of open source will take it and run with it. This can be contrasted with, for example, what happened with the InterBase database - in the rage for open source some 20 years ago Borland put up the code for InterBase, but within a couple of days changed their mind and took down the source code. But by then the source had been downloaded and became the Firebird database. The closed source InterBase is still for sale, even though Firebird ended up being completely re-written based on the code released 20 years ago. Someone posted this announcement by LC to news.ycombinator.com. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28370865 LC got less hostility from this announcement than from when LC would be mentioned in the past as an open source version of HyperCard. At the end of the day, if not enough funds go into LC Ltd then both the closed source and open source products would disappear - the past 8 years have shown us there is very little interest in people contributing to the source. It's chalk and cheese when compared with InterBase/Firebird. After 8 years there simply aren't enough low-level programmers who have any interest in a version of HyperCard for the 21st century. I could have switched to using the open source version of LC 8 years ago, but I continued to pay for a license because I understood that bills have to be paid or Livecode disappears. Regards, Bernard _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode