[REBOL] Re: Platforms to become 'unsupported'.........
From: roland:hadinger:arcor at: 16-Jul-2004 6:49
Hi Carl,
> Some of those reasons are technical ones, and a major other reason is it's
> not open-source. I didn't support REBOL going open-source when RT was
> managing to bring out updates for those 42 platforms all in the same week,
> but I would now. Whether RT could dream up a business plan that'd make
> them money by open-sourcing REBOL is a different matter though.
A good example of sucessfully going open source is the modeling and rendering
software Blender (www.blender3d.org)
Originally closed source, but like REBOL/view freely available for
noncommercial use, development of Blender happened to be painfully slow back
then, as there was just a very small team of developers. Similarly, the
acceptance of Blender was not too great, although the software already
incorporated many features. However, there was a critical mass of loyal users
really supporting the open source development model and it became open source
(story on www.infoanarchy.org/story/2002/9/8/231356/2303). Today, Blender is
much more polished and development cycles are greatly reduced.
There is a difference, though: back then, an open source alternative to
Blender did not exist, so there were no 'distractions' to the community.
REBOL on the other hand would have at least a few very successful contenders
in the open source arena, popularity-wise. But in my opinion REBOL (as a
language) is still superior to most of them (e.g. Python, Perl, PHP), so
maybe it's not too late to go open source.
--
R.
