I think the motivation is primarily uptake but there's going to be some interesting side effects. For example there are a number of people very keen to see this on the Raspberry Pi which will require an arm Linux engine as currently we only have x86. As the core goal of the Raspberry Pi is programming education I think LiveCode will fit nicely between Scratch and Python. The language is very much like the scratch language without having to drag blocks around.

I am starting to wonder if pitching the kickstarter as being for open source was a mistake. People are wondering why that costs anything. It would have possibly been better to just say... we're going open source but we want funding to make some massive changes to the platform. Here's an example of one of the core goals of the project http://blog.runrev.com/blog/bid/265511/Open-Language which I think is huge. Besides being able to extend the language with DSLs for your data model or library which is big on it's own there's two other VERY interesting possibilities:
  - create functionally equivalent syntax in another natural language (e.g. French like syntax rather than english) and the engine could display whichever syntax the reader preferred.
  - add other existing scripting languages (e.g. javascript or python) therefore giving them a cross platform UI framework

It has sold sufficiently well for many people to derive their entire income from the product for many years. The company is growing and making a profit but clearly it needs a no-barrier introductory level. They could have done that by just releasing a free version with a license that didn't allow distribution but where's the fun in that. RunRev's turnover may not increase at all as a result of this move but the use of the software definitely will. As an example, at present I'm reaching a LiveCode course to a group of disadvantaged kids at my local community centre. I struggled with choosing LiveCode for the course because of the cost of maintaining licenses. There are many other environments I could teach for free but none where they would be able to achieve what I wanted them to achieve in the time I had to give them. In the end I decided to run with it (the project has purchased licenses for each of them) but the whole decision making process would have been a no brainer if it were already open source.

1. Their current version is 5.5.3 and that is what will be released I believe (or 6???). But the GPL version will be the same source as the commercial product. Just a different license and a library for encrypting scripts which can't be GPL for security and licensing reasons.
2. Yes: Linux, Win, OS X, iOS, android and CGI engine that gives you php like scripting (see http://revigniter.com./ Deploying to different platforms is just a setting and the standalone builder will create executables for each platform you choose. There's a few people making noise about arm linux for Raspberry Pi.
3. There's DB drivers for SQLite, Valentina, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and I know there's someone keen to write a driver for Firebird as soon as he gets the driver source so he can implement it.

No, it's their complete product: engine, IDE and their addons they are open sourcing. If your making open source apps you won't need to pay anything. If you are making commercial apps then it's $500 for a year. Not a crap load if you need it and you can create your whole app using the GPL version then get commercial when you want to release. There's lots of uses for the open source version alone: education, prototyping, in-house productivity/automation tools etc.

Are you saying it's "lite" because it's open source? I don't get your logic. Where does it say anywhere that the GPL licensed version will be crippled?

wow, you've just argued away the entire open source movement

answer error "This is not COBOL" with "It sure isn't" or "Meh"

There's already people discussing implementing it in french. I think it would be pretty awesome to have this english like language suddenly become just natural language coding!

I've been working with LiveCode for over 10 years and develop third party addons for the platform. I don't consider the lack of object orientation to be a big issue although I would like to be able to set a behavior script on a behavior script. I won't say there aren't shortcomings to the platform. One of the biggest is trying to use a VCS with the binary file format. I'm working on an open source three way merge driver for that. I'm looking forward to getting under the hood and sending my first pull request on the engine and I'm hoping this move will make it a good option for a much bigger user base.