LiveCode Forums

Hi All,
700 users joined this forum in five days !
12500 since the first of january !
49750 members

Open source effect ?

Best regards
Jean-Marc

Hi Jean-Marc,

Surely, the open-source event is attracting new users, but looking at today´s birthdays it seems to me that 90% of all "users" are here just to collect your e-mail address and to post links to websites. Therefore, the figures you've found don't tell us too much about the number of "real" forum members.

Kind regards,

Mark

and it seems rev does not care too much about the forums and allows the accounts to exist - i guess it looks good

Hi All,

22 april 2013

52554: members
3400 new members for april
49945: 0 post
2609: 1 post or more

Best
Jean-Marc

Hi Jean-Marc,

Looks like almost 150 spammers and a few real users know to find this forum every day.

Best,

Mark

And I wonder how many will last the course.

"Still here after all these years" Richmond.

jmburnod wrote:Hi All,
700 users joined this forum in five days !
12500 since the first of january !
49750 members

Open source effect ?

Best regards
Jean-Marc

As far as I can tell RunRev have done a pretty good job of throwing cold water on the flame of Open Source Effect.
Everything about the way the company interacts with the online community is very much like a closed source company.

Almost nothing about LiveCode feels like an OpenSource project, apart from how helpful some people on this forum are.
I'm constantly getting emails from RunRev to buy this and buy that before the price goes up.

RunRev don't seem to have used any of the £493,795 they raised from Kickstarter to provide additional learning tools for free, so there's a bunch of us that have the community edition and haven't got a clue how to do all but the most basic things.

All the best learning materials was never made part of their stretch goals. It would have been so much more useful if one of their stretch goals was to open up the learning materials to all, instead of constantly trying to flog it.

Like about 99% of the people that came across LiveCode on Kickstarter it's probably the mobile phone side of things that's of most interest and I've seen almost nothing major in LiveCode that makes producing anything but a very basic looking mobile phone app possible. I also think RunRev played down the fact that the community edition of LiveCode would never be an option for people that wanted to publish to the Apple Store.

I was so excited about LiveCode when I found out about it (about 3 days after the Kickstarer ended) but now I've pretty much lost interest in it as a development tool for mobile apps.

I think LiveCode is a wonderful tool for students in schools and if I was an ICT Teacher I'd want my students starting off with LiveCode.
But I don't really envisage the day when you'll see many job postings for it, mostly of it because of the deflated balloon effect RunRev did on the project. They should have used some of that £493,795 to employ a person to just do nothing but focus on the OpenSource aspect of things and community building, and getting the system into more schools and companies.

RunRev haven't even bothered to post anything to their backers on Kickstarer since June 2013

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/175 ... e/comments

archer2009BUSknbj wrote: RunRev don't seem to have used any of the £493,795 they raised from Kickstarter to provide additional learning tools for free, so there's a bunch of us that have the community edition and haven't got a clue how to do all but the most basic things.

Well, your with has been granted!

RunRev have just announced that they are giving away free programming courses!

http://livecode.com/

Andrew

For most of us who contribute to LiveCode and other open source projects, there's more to open source than just "free-as-in-beer".

While it's laudable that RunRev are using their resources far beyond their stated objectives we supported with the Kickstarter compaign to also continue to expand their free documentation, we're also seeing the community step in and lend a hand with that as well, with a growing number of both code and documentation resources coming from those in the community invested in LiveCode.

Also, it's important to remember that the kickstarted version of Livecode isn't out yet! And won't be for several more months. The community release that exists today is just an open sourcing of the old version. The real kickstarted version is coming - with a rewritten engine and a redesigned IDE.

I would rather that RunRev not invest resources in promoting the existing version. Instead, as they appear to be doing, they need to focus on getting the rebuilt version finished, at which point I am certain they will promote the heck out of it, and you will see a major community building effort begin.

Hi archer, you can read some more updated info about the open source project in this post by Kevin Miller (RunRev's CEO): http://livecode.com/blog/2013/06/19/tra ... e-company/

Also, to get updated information about the project you can follow the RunRev's newsletter, here are some post about the project progress:

http://newsletters.livecode.com/july/is ... etter1.php

http://newsletters.livecode.com/septemb ... etter1.php

http://newsletters.livecode.com/august/ ... etter1.php


Here is the Newsletter's index page:

http://livecode.com/community/newsletters/

"As far as I can tell RunRev have done a pretty good job of throwing cold water on the flame of Open Source Effect.
Everything about the way the company interacts with the online community is very much like a closed source company."

I think that is a bit harsh, and I think another interpretation of their, admittedly 'bad' behaviour is valid:

For a long time (about 13 years) I have been having a love-hate 'thang' with RunRev (although I have only love for the product) and have seen
that they have gone through patches of treating their loyal adherents like mushrooms (keep them in the dark and throw . . . . at them), and at other times
being incredibly open, generous and helpful. Their situation looks much more like somebody with a really extreme case of mood swings than anyone
with evil intentions.

Further to that, I have a feeling that they got more money chucked at them with the Kickstarter thing than they ever expected (and that is really marvellous),
and with all the stretch goals they suddenly found themselves committed to everything is all rather overwhelming, and they are not sure how to react.

Interacting with the "community" (always supposing that there is a Livecode community rather than a more amorphous set of people who watch and comment
on what is going on) like a close source company is unsurprising; after donkeys ages as a closed source company one can hardly expect them to pop out from behind
their code secrets singing with flowers behind their ears . . . things do take some time.

I wonder if the 'problem' (and I think that there is one) might be that they don't seem to have got an Open Source mage on board (unless thats another
thing they haven't told us) to make sure they transform themselves in all sorts of ways.

About 8 years ago I went to a speech by Richard Stallman at the Palace of Culture in Sofia (Bulgaria), and, apart from the fact that Stallman got so shrill and offensive
that I left halfway through, it is obvious that Open Source qua Open Source, if it is to function somewhere close to the Stallman model (preferably without the
offensive and infantile shrieking) will involve a major paradigm shift from closed source.

RunRev are, also, in a very funny position indeed; they are attempting to become an Open Source company with a closed source product - and will always have to
consider very closely indeed how to be OPEN as the 'Open' in Open Source without compromising their closed source product: certainly wouldn't be my idea of fun.

I also think that RunRev may have promised too much much too soon. On their website they promise nightly builds, releases of release candidates every 3 days,
and, probably, free gummy bears all round. None of these are showing any signs of being in place right now; and, frankly, I really wonder about the practicability
of release candidates every 3 days under any circumstances.

One thing I would add to this very interesting discussion is that many people believe that becoming an open source company is equivalent to become a philanthropic institution, this is not necessarily true. They are simply different business models http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_m ... e_software

Many, perhaps most, successful businesses are driven by a vision which is philanthropic in nature, even when the org's framework is for-profit.

A famous example is Steve Jobs' vision of building a company to share liberating technologies; rich as Apple's become, making money for the sake of making money isn't what got them there. We see this in many successful companies, where the founding vision is about providing something of tremendous value to people, and money merely happens along the way - often more easily than those focused on money as their only goal, because a vision focused on delivering value to people will resonate with that audience.

Even small companies like RunRev often share this pattern: Kevin's not in this for the primary goal of just making money (though it's obviously useful and necessary). There are many easier ways to make money than making software development tools. Kevin is excited about what a toolkit like LC can do to help others make their computers do whatever they want, more easily than by any other means. That vision certainly resonates with us who use the tool and provide training to others eager to learn it, and with any luck now that it's free and open it can fulfill that vision beyond the wildest expectations of any xTalk before it.

Given LiveCode's unique attributes that distinguish it from other programming languages, in its modest way there's a fair chance it may even change the world, at last making it possible for people to take full advantage of their computing resources.

I run a small school teaching English to Bulgarian kids, and I have a problem that has caused me no end of problems over the 8 years my school has been running:

I have very strong views on what constitutes good education; meaning small groups (4-6) and totally involved teachers who care about the kids they teach beyond the classroom.

Now I am also, faux de mieux, a businessman; and Plovdiv (the city I stay in) is full of what I would call "EFL Factories":

They 'process' hundreds of kids through a one-size-fits-all educational model, producing kids with all the right bits of paper, but an inability in the vast majority of them, to perform such
simple tasks as going shopping in English. They also back up the standard school system insofar as they produce passive drones.

Those factories have money rolling in like nobody's business.

Now I want to pursue my own vision and yet, at the same time, keep my business afloat.

Needless to say, I do end up compromising a bit (and don't like it when I have to do that), and if Kevin Miller thinks in the same sort of way, his life, and the lives
of those people who work for him, cannot be easy. But it should be more interesting and spiritually rewarding than the other way.

The people at RunRev have always struck me as 'human' far more than many other set-ups.

And on that note, it gives me great sadness to see that 'Malcolm', who single-handedly produced HyperNext seems to have "gone under": http://tigabyte.com/