Well this kills any enthusiasm I had for the project, so much for donating.
I should have mentioned: obviously if we went closed source and commercial we'd either refund everyone who donated or give them a free license worth more than their donation - we don't want to leave you out in the cold! We appreciate your generosity! There'd be an awkward couple of weeks of transition but it'd be necessary and I think we can do it fairly and without leaving anyone screwed over.
[quote:388yrlxi]HTML5 would have been the best option as the baseline exporter since the code it generates is pretty much open and relatively unobfuscated, which would allow a good codebase to work on to create new exporters.
Considering the javascript sources are incredibly difficult to protect since they're just plain-text files, it would probably only be the C++ sources to the DLL that got closed sourced.
[quote:388yrlxi]Of course the poll is just an empty gesture, I doubt the results of it would sway your opinion one way or another since once a project starts seriously considering going down a closed path it's basically a done deal.
We don't make decisions solely based on a forum poll but I put it there as a quick way to get overall feedback from everybody, so lurkers can put in their view without having to type out a full "I support this" or "I don't support this". It's still a really useful indication of whether or not a decision we want to make is popular: if it's overwhelmingly popular, we can go ahead, if it's incredibly unpopular, we know that if we go ahead anyway, we probably need to do something or change something to mitigate the unhappiness it could create. So no, we're not going to make this decision solely on a forum poll even if it goes against us, but it's still important information to take in to account.
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I really hope I can always make time for the project and I have no intentions of ever leaving! But it is true that if we can come this far in our spare time, what could we do if we went full-time?
It would be amazing if we could go full time solely on donations, but we're simply not big enough to do that yet. It's obviously very kind of people to send money over off their own back, but in practice, the cold truth is this is not remotely enough to cover full-time work. It's a very, very long way from that. To demonstrate this, 0.x was about 250,000 lines of code, worked on for about three years by three people part-time, downloaded 275,000 times so far, and the donations have always been well below ?100/month. Do a bit of math for the wages for three full-timers and you see it's not really making a dent on living cost. And if we went full-time, we can make Construct at least twice as good for everybody - I mean, C2 so far has still been a spare time project - think if it had a full time team behind it! Again, we appreciate the generosity of those who donate, but we're just looking at this in a real-world sense.
It's been really interesting reading everyone's views and nothing's set in stone so do let me know if you have more thoughts. I honestly don't have a clear pre-determined agenda that I'm following, I'm still trying to figure everything out, and what everyone is saying here is factoring in to that. The situation is just that it'd be best for everyone if we could go fulltime on this (personally it'd be my dream job! I do this all the time anyway), and the fact is, in order to do that, something is going to have to go closed source. We just can't figure out a good commercial business model if it's all open.