Keith Devens .com

Keith, maybe you want to take a look into Orca.

http://trac.geekisp.com/orca

I always wished REBOL would be open-sourced. The interpreter seemed so small and efficient (not to mention extremely portable), and I wanted the source to be available. It would have helped its adoption, at least.

The question is whether it really would have helped? This has been debated endlessly on REBOL forums. I know many people whose first reaction is disappointment in that it isn't open source, but when commenting on the size, efficiency and design of any other open source language, these languages just can't keep up with a closed design like REBOL. They may have popularity, they may have a billion extensions, but they don't have efficiency and great design.

The fact is that REBOL is an extremely carefully designed piece of software, largely done by one person over the course of more than 20 years. The very last thing REBOL needs is for less experienced coders (like me!) to ruin that beauty. It sounds a little anal, but beauty and efficiency is what REBOL is about.

As of late, the number of developers has scaled up a bit with the new graphics subsystem being a third party inclusion, and systems like REBOL/Services is not done by the main developer entirely.

REBOL 3.0 should help scaling that up even further so that porting would become easier for other developers without ruining the main code tree.

I really hope that it doesn't get opened up too much, because it would simply damage it beyond repair.

The fact is that REBOL is an extremely carefully designed piece of software, largely done by one person over the course of more than 20 years. The very last thing REBOL needs is for less experienced coders (like me!) to ruin that beauty.

You make it sound as if once something's open source anyone can check things in willy nilly. That's not the case.

I agree with Keith. As much as I appreciate REBOL's unique design features, it seems programmers/engineers/sysadmins don't want to learn an exotic language that's closed source. Regardless of our wishes, the dog won't hunt.

Rebol Technologies could open source their code but still do something like MySQL or the PHP folks do. Both of those companies leverage their respective communities while keeping a revenue stream.

RT would be rewarded in the marketplace by serving the best productized version of REBOL, plus docs, training and consulting. This area has never been the strong suit of the OS community.

Isn't Carl talking about doing a rewrite of REBOL for a 3.0 release? How about at least open sourcing the 2.x codebase then?