Kay, while I don't disagree with much of the substance of your post, I
would suggest we all try to avoid comparisons with things that lead to
emotion-laden phrases like "leeching off society".
Open source is a gift, not an obligation, for both sides, developer and
user alike.
It's always a good thing when a gift is appreciated enough to engender
another gift in return, but I would avoid characterizing any choice of
participating in an open source process as an obligation.
The most important thing anyone can do with LiveCode is to simply enjoy
it. Without that, nothing else is possible.
Beyond that, if someone chooses to contribute to an open source project,
whether through code, documentation, cash, evangelism, or support, I
believe it's best to see that as a gift as well. The GPL guarantees the
freedom to make derivative works, but does not oblige us to do so.
Moreover, some of the strength of the sentiment here is that many have
already contributed to the open source project in advance through the
Kickstarter campaign, and that was a specific context in which
deliverables were described as being dependent on funding levels that
were more than met.
That the original estimates were off by more than two-fold is,
unfortunately for all of us in this industry, so far below industry
averages of estimate-cost variance that it's actually pretty good.
Most folks here are patient with the progress thus far; development
takes time.
But until the Kickstarter goals are met, development time spent on
proprietary-only extras will likely remain a sensitive issue, and
finding the best balance between meeting those original goals and
keeping the joint running to be able do so is a non-trivial challenge.
And in the meantime it's worth noting that new features beyond the
Kickstarter goals are also finding their way into both Commercial and
Community editions, such as being able to seek into large files beyond
the old addressing limit, Android intents, Unicode that goes beyond mere
compatibility with the past to introduce new chunk types invaluable for
language processing like trueWord and sentence, and more.
As with other dual-licensed projects, there's a delicate balance being
explored here.
While the truly perfect recipe for success has not yet been discovered
in this unique project, at a minimum we can move this exploration
forward most productively by avoiding emotion-laden terms.
--
Richard Gaskin
LiveCode Community Manager
rich...@livecode.org
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