Dr. Hawkins wrote: > But I just can't see where the revenue stream that keeps livecode > around will be.
The other examples you noted weren't dual-licensed. I think a good example here would be MySQL.
Before going dual-license, MySQL was just another foundering proprietary RDBMS, not much better or worse than a dozen others.
But through dual-licensing, they've been able to grow into a de facto standard, eventually becoming so huge Oracle had no choice but to buy them since MySQL was taking a huge bite out of Oracle.
I hope and pray the ultimate result here isn't acquisition by Larry Ellison, but I do hope the rest applies:
Being available to everyone as both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom, the audience can grow orders of magnitude larger than would be likely as a proprietary product.
As being a dev tool, there will be a certain percentage who will want to use it for proprietary deployment.
So even if the portion of the pie that needs a paid license is smaller, the pie would be so much bigger that net revenues would likely be a multiple of what they could be without the GPL option to evangelize it.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys _______________________________________________ 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
