Dirk Cleenwerck wrote:
> Now the price of Indy will double to 999.
Everything old is new again: When I bought by MetaCard license it was
$995 (and that was in 1998 dollars).
I'd love it if the price were lower, but having been in the dev tools
business myself I know it's a tough game: smart people who demand a lot
and for good reasons, but given the percentage of people in the gene
pool inclined to find programming fun (and the subset of those who
aren't, as we are, already so immersed in a language that switching to
another is very difficult), the total addressable market isn't very
large, at least not when compared to consumer software.
If we were at a point more mature open source projects are, where we had
a mix of giant corporate funders paying dev team salaries and a large
pool of ongoing code contributions from the community, overhead would
plummet and likely licensing fees along with it.
But in the meantime we are where we are, and for commercial ventures the
price still favorably compares with many alternatives, and is by far the
smaller of many expenses needed to run a viable business.
> The community version is nice and all, but you entirely miss the point
> that you have hobby people that are willing to pay for a license, and
> donations that don't give us anything are not an option either.
I'm not sure I understand, esp. given:
> PS: according to the GPL if the code is for your use only I don't
> think you need to publish any source code at all. It's only when your
> program is released externally that you need to release the source.
That's true - as a distribution license, its terms apply only to works
that are distributed. And even then we're seeing an ever-growing number
of projects choosing open source licenses in order to diversify and grow
the code base to accommodate a wider range of use cases than the
original developer could afford to support alone.
Personally, I don't believe it's possible in the 21st century for any
programming language to reach any sort of critical mass without being
open source. There are just too many FOSS alternatives; we haven't seen
strong growth for proprietary languages since the '90s. The very few
that remain on the TIOBE list may be holding steady, but only for
historical reasons unmatchable by any newcomer, and are not experiencing
growth.
LiveCode's dual-licensing seems to offer a good balance of interests,
supporting serious commercial ventures with a rare scope of platforms
and (really, check out the rest of the world) level of quality and
completeness across those platforms that makes development uncommonly
productive. And along the way, everyone else who doesn't require a
proprietary license can enjoy the same engine in a context where they
can build and share and enhance their work and others' freely in both
senses of the word, gratis and libre.
When self-described hobbyists says the price is too high but won't
accept a price of zero, or voluntarily offering any price they want
through donations, I'm being earnest when I admit I'm having a hard time
understanding that.
--
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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