OpenXTalk Lite Beta Testers

[TerryL]

I'm Terry Little. I've finished working on OpenXTalk Lite, a project separate from Paul's. It has minimal modifications other than debranding, based on my windows 32-bit LCC 9.6.3 copy.

I need a team of volunteers to assist bringing it public. Under this project there will be deadlines and progress reports in a Contractor-SubContractor model. I'm really not the guy to do this. I need a team assisting and advising. I need your help. If there's no interest, I'm concerned OXT is D.O.A.

(1) Beta Testers
o I need at least two volunteers for each platform with LCC 9.6.3 installed. Submit a post here with your platforms. I'll private message you a Google Drive shareable link for download.
o By August 31, private message me back a list of problems/improvements with possible ways to accomplish.
o By September 15, I'll post a public Google Drive shareable link for download of OpenXTalk Lite v1.0.

(2) Mark Wieder
I'd like to get the attention of Mark Wieder who has re-compiled a 64-bit Engine. Please contact me.

[richmond62]

The acronym for 'Dead in the Water' is not D.O.A.

Why do you think I am appealing for slightly under 500 Euros to buy a 'new-fer-you' iMac: so I can try this as am totally 'fuzzied' waiting for an OpenXTalk.

AND, if I "DO" it will NOT be called OpenXTalk.

[richmond62]

Certainly, if I manage a 'new-fer-you' iMac I WILL be able to offer:

1. MacOS 12 (64 bit) LC 963

2. MacOS 10.7 (64 bit) LC 810

3. MacOS 10.6 (32 bit) LC 6

4. MacOS 10.5 PPC. LC 6

5. MacOS 10.4 PPC LC 6

6. Debian Linux 12 (32 bit) LC 963

7. Xubuntu (64 bit) LC 963

For testing BOTH your 'crap' and my 'crap'.

[richmond62]

AND, iff, Apple sort things out so that LC 9.6.3 runs with MacOS 14 (Sonoma) , I can test things there.

[micmac]

Terry...

I think you need to give more information on your project than the two lines here.

Why is it called Lite

Why did you work on 32 bit

What do you expect for the near future of the project and in the long run

Mic

[FourthWorld]

I need a team of volunteers to assist bringing it public. Under this project there will be deadlines and progress reports in a Contractor-SubContractor model. I'm really not the guy to do this.

The ones who are probably can't afford to do that level of work for free.

Some months ago I took some time to think this problem through: how to make a truly viable open source xTalk.

I'll spare the details and get to the bottom line: the leanest plan I could come up with takes a minimum of a quarter mil for the first 18 months, with at least half that each subsequent year.

In addition to the C++ engineering needed for each of the desktop platforms, the work of maintaining/enhancing the IDE, documenting, managing the three platform contractors, and most importantly fundraising to make any of this possible, is a full-time job.

We could get into the details of this plan, and how I came to believe the most viable option is to establish a nonprofit foundation.

But let's set that aside for a moment to ponder the bigger picture beyond hers cost: opportunity cost.

Why do we want to do this?

Software continues to eat the world, but few have even heard about LiveCode, or even xTalk. Yet that ignorance hasn't stopped software from continuing its expanding role as a growth sector driving every other industry.

If xTalk went away, the worst thing that would happen is that all of us would be in the same position as every other developer using anything else.

But we'd have one disadvantage:

Every hour we spend typing xTalk is an hour we're not spending acquiring expertise with anything else.

Maintaining a code base as large and complex as this one is no small feat.

So before we commit to hundreds of thousands in expense, compensated or not, we'd do well to ask ourselves, plainly and soberly, why we want to do this.

If we can't come up with an answer that looks beyond our own legacy work to provide a compelling case appealing to a much larger audience of newcomers, the question is literally not worth answering, because it cannot be viable.

[richmond62]

I tend to agree with Fourthworld.

As I have stated before, from a purely selfish point of view I can state 2 things:

1. LC 963 "as is" is fine for my purposes with only 2 caveats:

2. A way to author standalones for Mac ARM processors.

3. A way to run the IDE on Mac ARM processors.

If all that anyone wants to do is carry on developing stuff with LC 963 there is NO reason at all to do anything: simply go on using LC 963.

Paul has tried to add all sorts of extra capabilities to the code base, and, in my opinion, got so bogged down and/or distracted by that that there is no sign of #2 or #3.

Possibly the 'Lite' idea is to provide:

1. A version of LC 963 with all references to LiveCode removed: from which anyone who wants to 'improve' the thing can move forwards: that is to say the opposite of what Paul appears to be doing.

2. Calling the thing "OXT Lite" seems a bit odd to me: I would just call in something else to avoid confusion with OXT [and whether that will ever come to light is another question].

[richmond62]

AND, it is far from clear to me why anyone needs to learn C++ to 'paint over the road signs' saying 'LiveCode'.

Of course, to work out an engine and so forth for MacOS ARM will involve a lot of clever jiggery-pokery.

[richmond62]

need a team of volunteers to assist bringing it public. Under this project there will be deadlines and progress reports in a Contractor-SubContractor model. I'm really not the guy to do this. I need a team assisting and advising.

1. Why would anyone trust you more than they would trust anyone else?

2. Deadlines are very rarely possible with volunteers. For example: I had a deadline to complete a short bit of programming for someone when friend of mine died [brain cancer] and I had to attend the funeral [6 hours]; so, obviously, the person I was doing the programming work for had to wait: when they got 'testy' I pointed out that I was doing it 'for love' so they could either accept that it was a day late or go and boil their head.

3. "A team". Well: I am perfectly prepared to assist and advise: but at the bottom of my list of priorities [and there are a lot]: but team work: having suucessfully avoided that for 40 years I am not going to get involved in that now.

[richmond62]

Every hour we spend typing xTalk is an hour we're not spending acquiring expertise with anything else.

If truth be know the vast majority of xTalk users seem to be racing towards pensionable age, so they may not feel a desperate urge to attempt to become as skillful in another programming environment as they are already in LiveCode: I know I do not experience that sort of urge at all, and ALL my needs are served with LC for the next 6 years, at which point I will retire.

Retraining is a very charming idea, and probably very sensible if you are 40-50, especially if you are in a situation where if you do not retrain you are shafted beyond working as a greeter in Walmart [fate possibly worse than death].

As I stated earlier . . . a way to build standalones for Mac ARM . . . might be enough for quite a few folk: and, obviously a way to 'fold' an ARM engine into the IDE.

Maintaining a code base as large and complex as this one is no small feat.

'Maintaining' ??? Code is NOT like a bag of mushrooms that will go 'off' if they are not frozen or dried. So the code can 'sit there', and anyone who wants to add a tweak here, a nip there, a tuck round the back, is welcome.

This is exactly my emerging criticism of what Paul appears to be doing: developing a thing that will end up about 50% different [possibly over-burdened with far too many new features] from LC 963; to the extent that it will actually be something very different indeed rather than what we might term "renamed LiveCode X" (and I am using the Roman X to avoid confusion with the upcoming LiveCode 10 being worked on by our friends up the road).

Surely what is needed NOW [or, possibly, 2 years ago] is nothing that really expands the current capabilities of LC 963.

So before we commit to hundreds of thousands in expense, compensated or not

I do feel, Fourthworld, that you might be overstating the case.

Indeed: I am sure LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, and so forth, are backed up by seriously big bucks.

Our local library, here in Bulgaria, has just sorted out about 50,000 Euros for expansion of storage facilities for a large number of books.

Now, in my house, where we only run to about 5000 books, very many of those books are crammed full of slips of paper where I have written notes and references over the last 45 odd years. Just the other day I was in London where I found 2 books I have been looking for since 1988: and it was with great pleasure I slipped them into our bookshelves WITHOUT requiring gazillions of $$$$ to make a new shelf.

The source code for LC 963 [purged of refs to LiveCode] can be stored in one or two places at no obvious cost, where it can be withdrawn, annotated, tweaked, what-have-you, and returned to the shelf. If people feel they'd like to make a copy and tweak that, and bung it on the shelf next to the untweaked copy, all well and good . . .

But "hundreds and thousands in expense", not really.

"LiveCode community continuing version" or whatever the thing is going to be called does NOT need to be like LibreOffice: for starters, unlike LibreOffice it is NOT attempting to compete with LiveCode commercial (and should not), while LibreOffice is trying to compete with Microsoft Office (which, I notice, has come down in price significantly, presumably under the impact of free alternatives).

---------------

Yesterday I had a very long meeting with the authorities of the Ukrainian refugee centre here in our town in Bulgaria, mainly re my continuing effort to set up a FREE branch of my English as a Foreign Language school there.

There were a number of people at this meeting.

One of these people who has obviously never, ever had to improvise in any way whatsoever, pointed out that we would need massive whiteboards for the 2 classrooms at about 500 Euros each . . .

. . . I pointed out that in the cellar of a property my wife and I own in the town I had 4 blackboards stored which had been chucked out by government schools about 10 years ago when they installed whiteboards: and at the cost of about 12 screws and 30 minutes of Richmond and his power drill, plus 3 or 4 boxes of coloured chalk . . .

They don't call me 'The Dumpster Diver King' for nothing.

That same person started talking further nonsense about expensive 'educational' tables and 'school' chairs . . .

As I also have access to 3 decent sized 'new-fer-you' kitchen tables [probably not a bad idea to cover them with Fablon], and 20 wooden kitchen chairs (might need a few screws where the joints are a bit shoogly after years of use) . . .

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fablon/s?k=Fablon

I already have 12 15-year old PCs featuring Xubuntu and ALL my educational programs in place: all with nice 1024 x 768 flat monitors 'donated' [meaning my favourite bank teller phoned me to say that they were retooling their stuff and those monitors would be 'round the back' at 5pm, so get round there with the car] by my bank.

Ooooh: pause to suck in cheeks: I PAID for the keyboards and the mice.

--------------

I pointed out that when I started my language school 19 years ago some wag who thought he knew better said I would need an initial investment of 10,000 Euros: and that I started with an initial investment of 250 Euros, and that over 19 years I had probably ploughed about 4000 Euros back into the school.

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So, let us allow ourselves a pause for thought and a working out of what we expect of this project (this MIGHT have been an exercise that would have been best done about 2 years ago).

Please take this LONG thing as a request for anyone who is really interested in some "LiveCode community continuing edition" to work out what they expect and publish it here, so we can have some sort of sensible discussion: not just Fourthworld's extreme at one end and Richmond's extreme at the other.

[FourthWorld]

We're talking about different things.

My interest is in exploring ways this code base may become a viable platform.

Anything smaller than that only motivates me to continue spending more time with JavaScript.

[richmond62]

So by 'viable platform' you mean a form of LC that expands to become a programming environment that can do 'everything' rather than the subset of things it can do now?

Is there evidence the commercial version is developing in that way?

[FourthWorld]

By "viable" I mean in a business sense, self-sustaining for the foreseeable future.

I don't know what "does everything" even means in a discussion of development platforms.

Other orgs with their own commercial interests in proprietary tools are not relevant to planning viability of a platform that is and can only be open source.

[richmond62]

Other orgs with their own commercial interests in proprietary tools are not relevant to planning viability of a platform that is and can only be open source.

Yes, I suppose so.

By "viable" I mean in a business sense, self-sustaining for the foreseeable future.

So . . . to work:

1. 'business sense' . . .

For the sake of argument:

I produce a piece of software called 'Devawriter Pro', it is what is called a 'niche product' [i.e. only for academic institutions and other interested parties in digitising ancient Indian languages] . . . as a friend of mine remarked, "So bloody 'niche' it has almost vanished up it own backside."

It makes NO business sense whatsoever . . . it is Open Source and it is free.

The versions of Devawriter are stored on DropBox for free.

I started the application, and continue to develop it out of my own, internal motives: just getting new bits to work with those complex writing systems gives me a big kick . . . as my friend said, "You are a kinky one."

Because it makes no business sense whatsoever my development of that application goes in fits and starts (no deadlines) as and when I have the time or the inclination.

People who want to use Devawriter Pro use it. Some of then send me donations from time to time.

Any 'LC 963 Community continuing' thing can be EXACTLY like that [in fact Paul, at the moment is behaving in almost exactly the way I behave with Devawriter Pro] . . . "no stress, no mess".

2. 'self-sustaining' . . .

Dunno what that means. Software is never 'self-sustaining'; either someone keeps developing it or they don't: it certainly does NOT do it by itself.

3. 'in a business sense' . . .

Even though the LiveCode community codebase is open source, someone could (as far as I know) charge money for an IDE based on it [although they would have to make their variant code-base freely available], and that could be at a price that would undercut the commercial version (say $50) but NOT really competing as LC Commercial and the thing we are discussing will, of the nature of the thing, diverge, and anything produced with the open source version will require that its code (stack) is made freely available.

4. GIMP / Inkscape / LibreOffice / Mozilla

How much these applications are dependent on paid income (rather than donations) is not clear to me. However, unlike what I outlined above, they do have paid employees.

5. 'self-sustaining' . . .

If by that you mean some sort of 'LC 963 Community Continuation' foundation [pace LibreOffice], that's a whole different thing in terms of organisation and scale.

I am not at all sure why something like that should be necessary.

-------------------

I run 2 language schools:

1. A commercial venture where parents pay me to teach their children English.

Accountants, Tax registration, Company registration, Hygiene inspectorate registration, Cash machine . . . you name it [and I experience it ].

2. A free operation [for about 40 Ukrainian refugee children].

Nothing but me, my assistant, two rooms, donated chairs, tables, other stuff and a lot of smiles.

OBVIOUSLY #2 would not be possible without #1 to 'pay for our bread and cheese',

------------------

I can see no earthly reason why an 'LC 963 Community Continuation' bit of software cannot be like my #2 as ALL of us hereabouts have some sort of #1 to sustain us.

-----------------

108. 'viability of a platform' . . .

What does that mean?

I have a cassette recorder in my school I use to store programs I write on one of my BBC Micro computers in BBC BASIC.

During programming classes children can load them onto either my BBC Model B, or my BBC Master Compact, and play with them and mess with the code. In that sense those computers from the 1980s are still 'viable': in almost every other case they are heaps of historical junk.

Personally I would state that 'LC 963 Community Continuation' was 'viable' if someone continued to use it and generate useful software from it for one or more of the platforms it can produce standalones for.

-----------------

You should be happy that my summer holiday is almost at an end, as, soon, I won't have time to belt off any more long-winded stuff like this.

[micmac]

Let us remember again that what Terry offers is very, very positive.

He has done something that can be a way forward.

We should be very thankful for that.


Mic

[richmond62]

Let us remember again that what Terry offers is very, very positive.

I am going to be the last person to criticise him.

I do feel, pace my last, very long posting, that some people are expecting far too much.

Or, if not expecting, at least suggesting that to carry on with this thing it has to be blown up out of all proportion.

[richmond62]

So: I opened 'Lite' on my 32-bit laptop running Debian 12 XFCE:
-

T1.png (286.41 KiB) Viewed 11255 times

-
1. Could NOT work out WHERE the Linux engine for LC 963 might be to swap it for the Windows one.

2. Tried running 'Lite' via WINE:
-

T2.png (9.8 KiB) Viewed 11255 times

-
Totally blocked, I'm afraid, as no obvious way to dismiss this redundant window.

Perhaps I should point out that LC 963 Community works 99% on this laptop.

The 1% is that the MessageBox does NOT receive focus.

[richmond62]

Dirty Questions:

1. Has 'Lite' been build from source code that has been mucked around with, or

2. Has 'Lite' not been built at all, but is the 32-bit Windows version of LC 963 that has had a 'search and replace' operation performed to
remove references to LiveCode?

3. That 'Registration Window' [probably some sort of splash stack] needs to go NOW.

[richmond62]

I don't think doing #2 is of any value in terms of anything except that particular version: that is to say 'swapping out' an engine is no good at all because the differences between how Linux, Windows and Mac apps is rather more complicated.

After all, the MetaCard IDE set up by Jaqueline Landman Gay could 'just' have an engine of whatever flavour dropped into it because, at that time, the LiveCode / Runtime Revolution IDE was a far simpler beast than it is nowadays.

[FourthWorld]

Let us remember again that what Terry offers is very, very positive.

He has done something that can be a way forward.

We should be very thankful for that.

Agreed. The question on the table is whether there's a path to take such good intentions toward building a sustainable platform.