[REBOL] Re: Rebol SDK vs Command
From: edoconnor::gmail::com at: 15-Sep-2007 11:37
Language/technology success is a product of getting an impossible
number of small details right, plus some luck-- there are no "silver
bullets". As such, I don't think that merely opening the source code
will change the prospects for REBOL.
Although a large % of the programming world has never heard of REBOL,
a significant % of programmers who enjoy learning new, dynamic
languages already have-- and most of them have already formed their
opinions of REBOL. R3 not only faces the basic challenge of winning
acceptance among developers, it has historical negative baggage to
overcome-- sins of the past.
Since moving to fully open source would not necessarily change
prospects for REBOL, I don't think you'd see a lot of people forking
it and creating competing versions. Most folks want a distribution
they can trust, and today that authority belongs to Carl. Offshoots
are the kind of thing that happens to popular languages, and frankly,
I wouldn't count it as negative even in those cases. You want parallel
processing in Ruby? You want .NET support in Python? If so, you look
into the alternative distro's of those languages, and you're probably
overjoyed that the language has a community so deep that these options
exist.
For some reason, one often hears "it's not fully open source" as a
reason for not adopting REBOL (or some other language). It would be
nice to remove that red-herring from the list of grievances, but as I
stated, I doubt that this change would make a big difference at this
point. With regard to "open source", I think most developers want
something completely open with no fine print of any kind. I'd like to
see REBOL take that plunge, but Carl is the owner of REBOL and I
respect his decisions. If there's something that I need that I'm not
getting from REBOL's new partial-open source model, or if the
licensing issues are too onerous, there are plenty of other
serviceable programming languages to fill the need.
Ed
