Rebol SDK vs Command

The Command SDK will have everything you need. I'm not sure what products are what anymore, but you can certainly do what you need; just make sure they know what you want to do, so you get the right product. Newer versions are available here: http://www.rebol.net/builds/ --Gregg

-- //Alessandro http://sguish.wordpress.com http://laccio.wordpress.com

Which succinctly sums up RT's problems as a 'business'. It doesn't open-source, so REBOL can't become a popular language, and it doesn't do the business basics to make it succeed as closed-source software. -- Carl Read.

Which succinctly sums up RT's problems as a 'business'. It doesn't open-source, so REBOL can't become a popular language, and it doesn't do the business basics to make it succeed as closed-source software. -- Carl Read.

But we've already got incompatible REBOLs, a lot of OSs being dropped between 1.2 and 1.3 (of View). This is the 1.2 list... http://www.rebol.com/view-platforms.shtml and this the 1.3: http://www.rebol.net/builds/ And when REBOL 3's released, we'll have another level of incompatibility. Here's the March 2006 discussion from this list about the announcement of REBOL 3... http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-display-thread.r?m=rmlYFBC I stick my oar in at post 13, pointing out that there's a heap of unfinished REBOL-related stuff around as it is. ('The Mac View version is still "pending" on their website, though in alpha or beta if you look deeply. And REBOL Services? It's still in alpha or beta too I believe, as is Rebcode. And the REBOL plugin is still only on IE.') I think there's been a Linux version of the plugin released since then, though I don't know the status of Services or Rebcode. And note the "My personal target date is to have alpha releases available in the late April time frame, with beta by June." here... http://web.archive.org/web/20060422002100/http://www.rebol.com/notes/rebol3roadmap.html#section-5 That was April/June 2006. See why I'm not too optimistic about REBOL becoming a success any time soon? I love the language to bits, but its marketing and direction is all over the place. -- Carl Read.

Carl, I just noticed some of your frustration, also in different thread. But - I don't want to listen to open-source = success crap, really :-) RT's situation has NOTHING to do with REBOL being oper-source or not. I will sum situation as follows: - I hate when RT did absolutly unrealistic news on their site - once it was about components (just to stop #R clone effort), another with "next month alpha R3", which was more than one year ago. I really don't understand, how so good developer as Carl could release such an insane info ... - RT applied closed development, because architecture of R2 did not allow otherwise - Communication of RT, mainly in 2000 - 2003 was terrible. It was much improved with Carl's blogs - The situation with R3 should now be completly different. Already in the design process, there were ppl like Gabriele, Ladislav, Cyphre involved. R3 rebol is just a .dll, which is platform agnostic, so all is needed (in theory) is just to recompile, the rest is open sourced. I think that that factor alone will not bring new ppl onboard, maybe a few. And as for me - I have absolutly no respect for ppl, which will bitch about R3 not being "fully" open sourced. I have friend, who is with Python, because it is open source, yet he never looked into its sources. OS seems to be a cult. I believe RT will accept help of those, who really want to help. This hybrid model should nicely work imo. - In addition to the above - Geomol already showed interest in trying to port to OS-X, and Carl agreed. It is already happening. Also some porting docs started to beeing produced - R3 vs R2 and incompatibilities. I say - forget R2, old story. I always objected, when ppl on altme wanted R2 to spend some time backporting to R2. You can still use R2, and some bugs might be fixed. But with so small community, I thing that further development of R2 is total waste of time, which prevents R3 from being finished. Unfortunately changes in R3 kernels are so big, that backporting is not possible in most cases. - As for R3 becoming public - I believe that situation is now more realistic, and that we can prevent unrealistic claims. Carl allowed us to inform rest of the community about the project status. My take is, that it will last some 2 - 3 months, before R3 is as usable, as R2. VID is not finished, nor are things as network protocols. Only http right now, although async, and 1.1 version. Currently we are investigating possibility of a) other ppl to help b) internal release to altme rebol3 world or ml release. - as for marketing, I want to volunteer to help RT to redo their site. There is very many areas to help. If you are interested, just express your wish. I believe that in few months we will all have enough oportunity to help. Porting, docs, websites, extensions, etc. Cheers, -pekr-

A lot aren't going to. Dropping support for your older tech is a sure way to lose customers.

No time to help these days - unless by writing extensions. I DO hope R3 lives up to the hype, but I fear it won't be really usable for another couple of years at the earliest. -- Carl Read.

I think that what you mention is just a theory. What RT's "customers" are we talking about? What "support" are we talking about here? Marketing/customer relations wise, RT was imo a bad company in the past. Lot's of missed oportunities imo. So - from that perspective, R3 model is very right and it should help to spread REBOL, because community of users and customers might be involved. Besided that - who said support for R2 is dropped? I just say that we should not expect some real development to happen for R2. It even does NOT make any sense. R3 is still REBOL, just based upon much better technological foundation, R2's model can't be easily extended ....

you see? And that is so with most of us, REBOL supporters - we have our main jobs. OTOH as for me, I don't want ppl to join REBOL just because it is, or is not open-source. I hope ppl will see that REBOL can be a good tool too ...

And why do you think so? R2 happened in a half a year after R1 "fiasco". R3 can run scripts already, VID can be used with some limits. It is months, surely not years. For R3 to live fully to its fully open model, maybe one year, but as for direct R2 comparison, we will be there very soon ... Petr

It's not that they choose one or the other, it's that there's a huge lot of people who just won't touch a new language unless it's open-source. And with good reason, as you're putting your eggs in a basket that other people control if the language you use isn't open-source. If it's open-source they'll look at it - otherwise not. -- Carl Read.

Well, I used Amiga, because it was cool. I use REBOL, because it is cool. I don't want such ppl to touch REBOL then, that is all. One either is enthusiast, or is not. Yes, R2 model was terrible, we could not correct/fix/extend almost anything. R3 changes it almost completly. So, do those ppl REALLY see source of the core kernel itself? Why? What for? Just for the sake of seeing some code? I think, that with hybrid licensing, they can feel safe enough. And who knows, maybe after some time, RT will open even kernel sources. If RT would went down, it was already being taking for, even for R2, the code would go to Escrow. So what prevents thouse ppl from feeling safe? Their fanatism? Petr

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. I agree, Carl should also get paid for his work in some way. I find open source a very strange phenomena that I have never got a handle on. Apple took open source UNIX and built an excellent OS on it, which has paid them back many times over. But this type of success is few and far between. Not certain REBOL can divest itself of the previous baggage either. It may need a complete re-invention at least in the marketing end. Time will tell... ~chris

And look where Amiga is now. A lot would still be using it if it had even a quarter of the popularity of Linux. And if REBOL was open-source, isn't it just possible that someone somewhere might've brought out a 1.3 version of View for it in response RT abandoning support for Amiga?

It's not about 'seeing some code' or enthusiasm. It's about security. It's about knowing if feature X isn't available with the main source that someone, somewhere might've already produced it, or if it isn't, that at least it'll be possible to make. And it's also about knowing that if the platform your software is running on 'advances' and stops your software from running, you won't have to wait until the only company in the universe that can fix this gets around to doing so - assuming they even plan to.

History. Including REBOL's history. See Amiga above, or BeOS or the other abandoned OSs. REBOL was promoted as a cross-platform language, and with a vengence. "42 platforms supported" etc. That was the hype and they delivered until the bubble burst. But it has burst, so buyer-beware from now on. They weren't able to deliver long-term on their promises, so why should we believe any current or future promises? I'm not a C programmer and have no intention of learning it anytime soon. But I'll be sticking with REBOL though, because I love it. This isn't about me - I'm just being realistic here. There's just way too many roadblocks for REBOL while it's proprietary software. It's like the drunk searching for something under the lamp-post at night. When asked what he was doing, he said he was looking for the penny he'd dropped. And when asked where he thought he'd dropped it, he pointed off into the darkness. So of course he was then asked why he was looking under the lamp-post, to which he replied that he could at least see things under the lamp-post. From RT's POV, staying proprietary might look the easiest way to make money from REBOL, but I doubt it's where any pennies are and it's certainly not any way to have an effect of the direction computing's going - except indirectly, by others incorporating REBOL's good points into other languages. They need to bite the bullet and decide to make it fully open-source and then figure out how to make money from it under those conditions. -- Carl Read.

Carl knows this very well (maybe he shouldn't have tried from the beginning, but, the past is the past). RT is not going to make money from R3, the language. There are other plans. Carl Read:

That's not the reason why R3's core is not open source. Regards, Gabriele.

And the reason is? I can think of others, such as it containing licensed code from sources other than RT, or that RT has made promises to customers that they wouldn't open-source it. Or that they're just stubborn on this point. But you didn't say why, so I guess you're not allowed to. Thus we waste time guessing... -- Carl Read.

Thanks for the reply Gabriele. I don't blame Carl for building a company around a proprietary scripting language. On the contrary, back then I encouraged it. Back in the 1990's, quite a few companies did this, especially during the early years of the web. A fair number were successful. Unfortunately, the window of opportunity closed quickly, and, among other things, RT was a victim of bad timing. Personally I am not concerned about Rebol's future. I would like to see Rebol achieve success on whatever level Carl and team define. For my individual needs, I already deem it a success. Thanks for your many contributions to Rebol and your work on R3. Good luck with the plans. We'll all be keen to see what lies ahead. Ed

To keep others from meddling with the language. It's that simple. And yes, if it were opened, people WILL meddle with it in directions that could quickly move it into a corner, feature wise, so you can't do this or that with it. You can't avoid forking or design by committee as seen in so many open source programming languages. To be frank, how many coders out there can outsmart Carl Sassenrath and code a better REBOL 3? If people say, they won't use REBOL, because it's not open source, then they will likely not spend time on it anyway in order to understand the way the language is designed, and then just use it as a traditional language; For them, REBOL gives no added value and they might as well turn to Ruby or Python. I've had this conversation with some open source enthusiasts, and it goes exactly like that. They will not accept it as anything but a Ruby/Python alternative and completely ignore the features that make REBOL unique and powerful, not as a language, but as a platform. Same reason, why I was asked why we didn't use GTK+ for the UI rather than write our own VID3. It would be nice if the open source crowd (particularly the GPL crowd) were a potential audience, but they can't be that, unless they are willing to go truly in depth with the language and try to understand it. The commercial opportunities for RT would likely be in products like IOS, not the language itself. I don't know the plans, but I hope and expect that R3 will be much less costly than R2, perhaps completely free. And let me tell you this: R3 builds on the 7-8 years of experience of R2. I've used the R3 alpha since early July, and one of the big differences here between R2 and R3 is that almost anywhere in R2, where you have a limitation or a design flaw, be it ports, async, tasks, file management, error handling, graphics, sound or hardware, those flaws are simply gone in R3 or will disappear over the course of alpha and beta development. Not many shortcuts have been taken. Redesigning the graphics system has made it a breeze to use along with VID3, where you in the old VID constantly bump into limitations and bugs and have to spend hours and hours of hacking to achieve a certain functionality, if it's possible at all to do, due to the hardwired nature of the event and graphics system in R2. We won't get everything with 3.0, but be sure that the limitations are far fewer than with R2. This opens a subject of post-beta development that leaves the argument of open sourcing the core language in the dust: The question of how fast the peripheral capabilities of R3 can be developed. Porting to other OS'es, building drivers, the Wildman project, additional documentation and cookbooks. This is almost only a question of how many smart people you can find and put on these parallel, almost autonomous projects. The pace of integrating R3 into your environment will no longer be decided by RT, but by you. There is going to be a _lot_ of work to do: Easily everyone on this list can have a job to do, and the members of the core R3 team already have their hands full enough that there is going to be need for extra help soon. I'm betting personally that with around 50 people, we can support and maintain the 40 advertised platforms by the end of 2008, plus have better integration into each system, and all of them will have proper documentation. This leaves RT to focus on the core language and their commercial product endeavours. -- Regards, Henrik Mikael Kristensen

Assuming there's not many, why is he worried? So REBOL might fork, but how will that stop RT taking REBOL in the direction they want it to go? And if RT's version is better, won't it be the version that attracts the most users? And it's already forked - R2/R3...

But there's the problem. You're wanting the open-source ethos to support and maintain what's at core a closed-source product. -- Carl Read.

If you don't get any contributions, then making it OS is a waste of time for Carl, and a problem from the point of view of investors and other partners etc. (Well, that's debatable in principle, but it is a fact at this point.) So in the end, there is not much advantage for the community (maybe for small bug fixes, but that would not really scale up, and Carl would still need to check or do all the fixes), and there are only disadvantages for RT. In particular, to protect RT, one would not be able to use something like BSD; the only OS license that i think would protect RT adequately would be the GPL, but half of the world (including Carl) hate it, so it's a no go. In the end, there is really no choice. Regards, Gabriele.

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.

How would you know that RT's version is better than a competing version? Which Java is best? MS Java or Sun Java or another implementation? Freedom of choice is good only up to the point where it just confuses you. Besides, having different implementations just makes REBOL much harder to code and test for. Ever tried building a complex webpage for multiple browsers? It's a nightmare. Having a single, clear voice is the big advantage of REBOL.

R2 is not forked. It's obsoleted. R3 is not in competition with R2. -- Regards, Henrik Mikael Kristensen

And how will you attract 'a lot of developers' without it being open-source? I just see a huge disconnect with this POV. (And yeah, I consider 50 developers a lot.) -- Carl Read.

No, it's ignorance and demagogues that don't understand how business works. But anyway, let them be. For me the best argument is: I did this app with 2,5 FTEs in 6 month. My competitor did an equivalent application with 2 developers in 5 years. You can expect us to keep that pace in the future. We are your partner: fast, lean and innovative. If others switch, ok good, if not, they might learn it the hard way. Of course not all applications will be done in Rebol but the ones that are just need to be the rights ones to show companies what is possible. And I'm sure, they are adapting it very fast than. Robert

I don't want to attract anyone thinking open-source is holy-grail of computing, perioed. If someone is so dumb, let him be so dumb. Easy as that. This POV is COMPLETLY out of reality, see my other answer to Ed O'Conor ... -pekr-

But this one, I am not sure is accurate :-) Why would RT not use e.g. MS Developer Studio to code REBOL? I know, they can always get free C compiler, but as for low level, the story is different. I work for large company, worked for even larger in the past. Those measures simply DON'T fit! Do you want to know opinion of most CIO's on open-source here? They really don't care! That one is for Carl Read too - CIOs DON'T care. They are not stupid. You don't buy only product, but also support. Do you know the price of 1 man-day of e.g. SAP or IBM consultant? You would buy 5x REBOL/Command SDK for that price. In the situation, when you don't want to extend your team, you have to choose technology, where you can take a phone, and have a consultant working for you in few day. Don't get me wrong, as I said, I can understand open-source advantages, but I can also imagine open-source geek coding tonnes of apps in php, out of order, non documented, and once I need to replace the guy, I am screwed, because mostly those open-source geeks want to do everything their way , not respecting higher level integration opinions. And believe me - If I should allow my guys to use PHP, I would do it from the same perspective, as introducing JAVA, REBOL, anything else. And believe me - open-source nature would be the least important point to consider. Do I get the support or not? This community is VERY helpful. I have been on ml of several other open-source products, yet I got worse support than with REBOL. Now what is that? As for RT going down. It was already said, that source code is put into Escrow - if RT goes down, it gets released. Besides that - most of R3 IS open-sourced. RT keeps platform agnostic interpreter/language code. Do those open-source proponents complain about MS non releasing source of Windows? REBOL calls tonnes of platform functions, to which there is no code available, yet they don't complain. Simply put - I don't believe, that fully open-sourcing REBOL would help much nowadays. There are other factors. REBOL had its window of oportunity, which was missed. We have to fight the position hard once again. And I believe being open-source or not does not really help. I always thought I like REBOL because of its capabilities. I really wonder, how can anyone join the community just because something is open-sourced? That person surely will not understand advantages of REBOL aproach, beause if that person would understand it, he/she would like to use the technology anyway ... Petr

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 .

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.

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

Developer Studio to code REBOL? My analogy was about RT being willing to write REBOL in a proprietary language, not about their willingness to use a proprietary IDE or compiler. Developers are often willing to pay money for tools, extensions, add-ons and solutions (such as a RAD IDE, component, or a DBMS). It's the language that most people expect to be free, just like I don't pay anything to read/write/think/create in English, but I pay for tools such as pens, paper, phones and computers to store, compose or transport my words.

really don't care! That one is for Carl Read too - CIOs DON'T care. They are not stupid. In my experience, CIO's tend to be anti-open source. They are business managers whose job is to contain IT costs while supporting key business functions with minimal risk. But open-source or not, any company large enough to have a CIO will endorse only standard software/platforms/methodologies backed by the corp. giants(i.e., someone they can sue if something goes wrong) and offshore vendor teams. If RT wants to sell R3 in a B2B model, the dll should remain closed, and R3 should retain its commercial, proprietary branding. In this model, R3 should demonstrate clear, quantifiable advantages (either generally or in a specific, marketable domain), and it should come with a justifiably expensive price tag (price is associated with value). Looking back at the past decade of RT and the unique nature of REBOL, I imagine this approach presented some tough challenges. If RT wishes to sell R3 in more of a B2C model (i.e., don't sell the language, focus on selling add-ons, SDKs, Apache mod's, etc.), then opening the language fully might remove an important barrier to grass-roots adoption. I'm sure open-source comes with a set of headaches, but like it or not, conventional perception is that open-source offers a critical advantage for a language, and closed-source for an upstart language is a deal-breaker. I can see a lot of words have been written on this topic, and I think I've finally said all I can say about it. Personally I'm not disappointed that the R3 .dll will not be open-source-- that isn't important to me-- I use Rebol for personal, end-user programming. Arguing against or in favor of open-source requires an understanding of RT's business model, which I'm not privy to. Whatever the case, I, like all of us, hope R3 is a giant success and the start of a great rebolly future. Cheers, Ed