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[REBOL] Re: oss revisited (briefly!)

From: joel:neely:fedex at: 13-Feb-2004 15:08

Hi, David, David Feugey wrote:
>>>... no OSS version of the language means no fragmentation >>>of the source code. >> >>That simply doesn't follow. Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. etc. etc. >>have been open source from the beginning, and don't suffer from the >>oft-threatened specter of fragmentation. It simply hasn't happened. >> > > It is... When you want to make a GUI with Perl, you have the choice > between about 10 toolkits. None of them is standard or widely used > (sorry, I call this fragmentation). It's the same for CGI, network, > image reading, etc. >
That has nothing to do with closed-source-vs-open-source issues. If two different programmers write, and offer to the world, two different solutions to the same problem domain, that doesn't mean that "THE SOURCE CODE" of the language itself has fragmented (which was the original complaint). Andrew's ML dialect is one solution to generating HTML/XML/SGML/etc. Someone else could come along and write (and give away) a different solution to that problem. That isn't fragmentation of the language itself. Perl was invented before the time when people considered full-blown graphics to be a part of a core language. (Some people still don't consider that to be so...) Different people wrote graphic libraries and frameworks (or adapters to externally-existing libs and fws) for use in writing graphic applications in Perl. That doesn't mean that the language itself is fragmented, any more than the independent existence of MySQL and Oracle mean that any language that can talk to both of them is fragmented.
> ... > >>This is *not* parallel to the case of R# and REBOL. REBOL is an >>implementation, without a publicly available specification. That >>means that any effort to create another implementation is based on >>inferences, guesswork, etc. etc. etc. and can't be guaranteed to >>match precisely the behavior of the implementation from RT. >> > > Yes, you're absolutely right on this point... specifications should be > public. >
I still believe that this would be the biggest single step toward facilitating the growth of REBOL.
> Pros and cons for both... even if I prefer an OSS model. > > But Rebol is pretty good... Appart from the licence (still not clear) > it's a good language, and for me it's essential. >
I agree that it's a good language. I just want us not to be caught comparing apples with Thursdays when we talk about the pros and cons of different distribution/development models. ;-) -jn- -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Joel Neely joelDOTneelyATfedexDOTcom 901-263-4446 Enron Accountingg in a Nutshell: 1c=$0.01=($0.10)**2=(10c)**2=100c=$1