REBOL Opening Up
The architecture plan for REBOL 3.0 shows that REBOL is slowly moving toward open source. The R# project, an independent open source REBOL implementation, has apparently stalled. The independent Orca implementation of REBOL has lost its founder, but other implementors are still at work as of October 2006. It may be that the slowness of implementation is a way to avoid threatening RT's business.
Personally, I am glad to see REBOL opening up. It seems that for most markets, closed software is gradually drying up and going away. Rather than going away as that market does, RT is doing a really smart thing, similar to what Sun is doing with Java. I hope that they will create a formal definition of the language, so that parallel implementors can develop compatible offerings. Looking at the business model of Red Hat, for example, almost everything that they distribute is freely available, but they do earn income from those who want support and reliability.
There is no mention of what license the various components will be available under. I hope that RT will select one or two licenses from the set of OSI-approved licenses, one of which should also be FSF-approved.
If you compare Rebol and RedHat, you probably know, that RedHat distributes gigabytes so it’s often easier to buy CDs or DVDs from them but Rebol stuff is only in kB and it’s fine (but RT probably cannot make business on selling CDs with Rebol). RT was trying to make money on selling PRO and SDK licenses, but it looks that people these days want everything just for free and open. Anyway, I agree, that Rebol should be more open with R3 and I hope, RT will still have enough income to continue in it’s existence. Because it’s not easy to live in corporation’s driven IT world these days.
oldes
Thursday, 2007-March-08