LiveCode goes open source as RunRev raises £500,000

SOFTWARE firm RunRev, which is backed by Apple co-founder Mike Markkula, will today reveal it has raised nearly £500,000 to turn its flagship LiveCode programming language into an open-source product.

The company, which was founded by chief executive Kevin Miller while he was still a pupil at James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh, will make the software freely available to schools and to mobile phone and tablet computer application (app) developers.

Version six of LiveCode will be free to download, but companies will have to pay a licensing fee if they then want to start selling the apps they create.

RunRev raised £493,000 through the Kickstarter crowd-funding website, which has been used to finance creative projects including computer games, dance shows and short films.

News of LiveCode 6.0’s launch comes just weeks after it emerged that one of the creators of the £2 billion Halo computer games franchise is using the software to create his latest title.

Alex Seropian, who was also head of games development at Disney Interactive, used LiveCode to create an “interactive graphic novel” called Morning Star Alpha. Players will be able to read the novel via a mobile phone app while using the full shoot-’em-up game, Morning Star 3D, released by Seropian’s new firm, Industrial Toys.