Request for Licence change for Raspberry Pi

I guess this is for Geoff to consider.

I’m retired from paid work, and have written a couple of simple pro-bono apps that mainly run single user or on small LANs. I am in the early stages of developing a larger specialist pro-bono project based on Xojo with a shared SQLite database.
If it works, I expected that many of the users would install a single Web App (possibly on a Pi 5) and that would be available to several clients on that LAN.

I understand why the “Lite” licence had to go (I ran, and then owned a specialist software company with a couple of thousand customer “seats” :slightly_smiling_face:). It is likely that my prospective users would find the US$499 price for a Web licence too much if they needed to make GitHub changes and then put them into production (I’m old, and may not last as long as the project :wink:).

My first looks at Console REST apps indicate that they are harder and more tedious than the excellent Web version - I was wondering if a Raspberry Pi licence (not the general free Linux Licence) could be changed to allow running of Web Apps on the Pi as well as the existing Console and Desktop systems?

As I see it, checking for the OS/Processor could be incorporated into the system to ensure that it is only run on a Pi. This may also give Xojo an easy cheap gateway to selling Xojo Cloud Hosting Packages for those who can afford it, or at least a reason to buy the Web version after they have trialed production with the Pi.

I think to try it, you run it inside the IDE.

And when you deploy to your Webserver, you buy a license.

Technically you could run your app in the debugger on the Raspberry Pi for weeks and route traffic to it.

True. As “an old white rich man” :grinning_face: my concern is not for me. The project is to support an ISO standard, for which I am a volunteer technical assessor. Normally this is often 'paper based" or the software is “free” FOSS. In the “developed world” a number of expensive commercial systems are available, but are overkill for what I’m trying to do. If it works, it could be run by “third world” users, many of whom have access to Raspberry Pi’s. I’d expect that companies and local authorities could purchase relevant licences for larger deployments, but my concern is smaller organisations who are run as not-for-profit or as charities in areas where larger systems can’t be supported. I’m intending to put most of the internal logic in SQLite with triggers, etc., to ensure data integrity. In principle, much of it could be run in the sqlite3 CLI, but it would be much better with a standard web GUI. I really don’t want to do it with Python/Flask etc.

I would guess that technically Xojo freed “Linux ARM for Desktop”. So people can use on Rasp-Pi, but in theory it could run in any Arm compatible Linux environment. 98% of the web deployments are for Linux environments, and now several are ARM targets. So freeing web for Rasp-Pi, as you wish, could cause a collateral sales damage, I guess that even some host services may be having a farm of Rasp-pi (and compatible ones) to serve people right now, Linux ARM VMs are all around. That’s a reason. The free “Desktop Pi compiler” is something they use to attract sales to other spots as Web.
As for charity, the charity dev can write whatever he wants for free, and someone could buy a compiler for them, with discount, requested from Xojo, after proven as an official charity entity.

Thank you, that is food for thought…

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