Re: ActiveState seeking Lua community feedback

Not everyone that deploys software is a developer or even technical. SIL, long term support/escrow and access to the system‎ are just a couple of places this kind of support makes sense to me. If software has moved into customer service‎ support, a junior person could be placed in charge of maintenance instead of a high cost developer. And remember, developers leave and take their brains with them. If you can lose a developer and replace them without having to relearn the toolchain, that's easily worth a couple hundred to a thousand dollars.

A conversation like this

Manager: "Can you patch such and such and re-deploy to the customer?"

Developer: "I don't know, Jim was the one that wrote the build scripts and he left a year ago."

Can cost a lot of money.

Russ

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Virgin Mobile network.

From: Peter Hickman

Sent: Thursday, November 3, 2016 2:48 PM

To: Lua mailing list

Reply To: Lua mailing list

Subject: Re: ActiveState seeking Lua community feedback

On 3 November 2016 at 17:23, Andrew Starks <andrew@starksfam.org> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Peter Hickman
<peterhickman386@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Gee ActiveState, thanks for helping out.

And now it's time for all of us to wonder aloud, "Why doesn't Lua see
wide spread adoption?"

Spreading fear and doubt about open source software licensing just to drum up some business is not going to help Lua see widespread adoption. For managers who lack the technical background and have a naturally cautious bent looking for the downside is what has probably saved their job many a time. They might not understand the benefits but they sure as hell recognise a liability when they see one.

ActiveState seems to be pushing this as their unique selling point. I don't believe that the Lua community will benefit from this approach.

They seem to be taking the same approach with Ruby as well:

> Why take risks with open source Ruby and community support? Your business needs a Ruby distribution that has passed through a professional QA process and has regular security releases

Gee thanks, I've been using Ruby for years and somehow it has worked fine without "a professional QA process" and the security releases have been just fine.

It sounds like ActiveState is not for you?

They used to be my go to for Perl and Tcl on Windows back in the day. To be honest I was surprised to see they were still around.