[REBOL] Re: Rebol SDK vs Command
From: henrik:webz:dk at: 18-Sep-2007 8:58
On 17/09/2007, at 22.06, Carl Read wrote:
> On Monday, 17-September-2007 at 16:37:19 Henrik Mikael Kristensen
> wrote,
>>
>> On 17/09/2007, at 11.54, Carl Read wrote:
>>
>>> So REBOL might fork, but how will that stop RT taking REBOL in the
>>> direction they want it to go?
>>
>> It will take away potential developers from working on R3. As said in
>> my previous mail, there will be a need for a lot of developers once
>> R3 goes final, so the open source question will have much less
>> importance than the amount of man and brain power we can find.
>
> And how will you attract 'a lot of developers' without it being
> open-source?
Because, if you are really interested in REBOL and care for it's
purity, you will not want the core (You say "it", as if the whole of
R3 is closed. It's not, of course.) to be open source. You will want
the core to be pure, clean, simple and unified. Are you handed a
paintbrush when you go down to the art gallery to fix up other
people's paintings? I always thought Mona Lisa's nose should have
been more red, but do other people agree? I hope you see the point.
The DLL is RT's Mona Lisa.
I think you want the DLL to be open source, because you are afraid that:
1. RT will go belly up the day after final 3.0 is released.
2. RT does not communicate development statuses to the people, so you
can't really know what's going on in development.
3. Carl Sassenrath decides to focus on making wine or go hiking in
the hills and lets bugs be unfixed, no matter how much we yell and
shout.
4. Evil people use closed source and RT will fill the 250 kb DLL with
spyware and nasty viruses. Now you can't truly know that, can
you? :-) R3 might even have banner ads in the console. That's
technically possible. Beware!
5. People will see REBOL as a simple programming language and
therefore a competitor to various open source languages and therefore
can't compete.
6. Carl Sassenrath is not a good a coder, so he doesn't want sources
to be published, because that would embarrass him.
7. The DLL will somehow be full of security holes.
8. REBOL will in the end only be attractive to weird people, who hate
mainstream stuff. Like us.
9. RT will not implement that one little feature you want so dearly
implemented.
10. R3 will not fix any of the problems R2 has.
Let's use these points as a base for discussion. That's better than
open source is cool
.
> I just see a huge disconnect with this POV.
Making a project fully open source is not the means to attract
developers. I've been there and did my fair share of cheerleading
without success. That's one of my causes for alarm (but not the main
one), when people suggest open sourcing REBOL, because they believe
it will magically cure the popularity problem. Let's see whether QNX
becomes more popular now.
If people will join the project, they will do it, because it's
interesting for them to use the same code on their PC as they do on
their Mac or Linux box or their embedded platform, because of REBOL's
unique opportunities. Not because it's a competitor to Ruby, Python,
PHP and whatever.
> (And yeah, I consider 50 developers a lot.)
50 developers is a small number, considering how much work needs to
be done. The first 15 already have their hands full.
--
Regards,
Henrik Mikael Kristensen
