Mistakes I Have Made!

Mistakes I Have Made! Everybody, Regards recent antagonisms on this list regarding some posts I made, having had a few days to calmly reflect I would like to apologize to the my felleow REBOL friends here on this list and the RT folks, Jeff in particular. OSCAR: Opposing Sentiments Create Antagonised REBOL's I made a few mistakes, I don't think I was being a pushy "religious" person and I don't apologise for the views I expressed, but I apologize here to Jeff, Holger & Cecil for becoming embroiled in a mini flame war. I don't want such things in REBOL, quite the opposite in fact, that is why I made my previous apology about religious flame wars. I'm sure like everyone else you've looked aghast or laughed at the sillyness of such things in the past, and how counter-productive they are, yet someone condemns your views or criticises your integrity and down comes the red-mist! It's the first time I've personally ever been involved in such an incident but I will try to learn from it, and count to ten next time. I also want to apologise for the "Pravda" comment, looking back I can easily see how that might be taken out of context. I was not trying to portray REBOL Technologies as an "EVIL EMPIRE" and myself as Luke Skywalker. That is just silly! Everyone knows that Microsoft is the Evil Empire (Or is it now AOL?). Rather the comment about Pravda was trying to question whether divergent or dissident views are acceptable on this list or should we keep quiet if we don't agree with the official RT view on a subject. Sure I believe that in some ways RT policy and strategies, hinder rather than help REBOL make the progress I believe it is capable of. Now if you want to get religious and medieval then I suppose that view on this list might be considered "Heresy". The question is what to do with Heretics? Burn them? Exile them? Castigate them and mock them? And that is another mistake I made. The last thing I wanted to do was Polarize people or my opinions. Iam not a open source free software zealot. At work and at home I use Windoze & AOL, because it is convenient for me. I have used Linux & thought it was cool and a good operating system but it is too "Unix" for my liking. I really like the new MAC OS-X look and feel but stuck with an Intel X86 architecture because it gives me more choice. Anyway I'm rambling, so let me get back to what I was trying to say. Yes I do prefer open source software because that gives me greater freedoms to use and learn from it what I can. It also means that a technology is not totally reliant on a company. I'm sure the Amigans on this list, at least, will appreciate the significance of that. But, and this is very important, I believe in symbiosis, co-operation, co-existence and tolerance. I do not support the schism between free software and commercial software. There are things that free software and collaberative projects do well and things they do badly. There are also things that commercial developers and companies do well and also do not do so well or focus less upon, for many reasons, financial & competitive factors included. They do not and should not preclude each other, that is a dangerous idea. That Iam right and you are wrong, and vice versa. I want REBOL to be an inclusive tribe with a strong community, we do have a great community, and it can be even better, so again I apologize if I've alienated anyone or felt like I've polarized anyone. One of the reasons behind the OSCAR project and a lot of the points that I made in my posts was that I would like to further strengthen the REBOL sense of community, by providing a forum where the community can collaberate and work to providing our own solutions to areas that for whatever reason. RT can't or haven't addressed. As I said yesterday, the PERL community have pushed that language in all sorts of directions that Larry Wall and the core team could never have imagined at the start. RT are a business, they have to be financially viable to continue to exist. I really do want them to succeed and prosper. They rightfully are focusing their REBOL efforts at the enteprise markets where the most money is to be made. A strong REBOL Technologies Inc. is very important. It gives REBOL credibility in the Fortune 500 and Enterprise arena, which believe me is very important to the success of any technology. They provide a clear and obvious focal point for development and support of REBOL something that languages like PERL and Python in many ways suffer from. However we the REBOL community have a part to play to, we can provide our own solutions, many of you already are. REBOL.org was the natural focus for such activities but for whatever reason that seems to be stuck in limbo land just now, hopefully Maarten Koopmans new EREBOL site can become the focal point for the REBOL community. You know the REBOL list is very active, I've never understood why the chat room at REBOL.org was never used much, if at all. I for one would really like to speak to a lot of you fellow list members in real time, anybody else up for this? Now this would make us a real community. I've tried not to talk about OSCAR here, but just a couple of points I'd like to make. I will promote and protect OSCAR whenever I can because I believe that it is important and that by doing all I can to ensure it becomes a reality, then we will all benefit from that. However I also want to stress again OSCAR is intended to be complementary to REBOL and not a competitive replacement or divergent from REBOL. In many ways I see a parallel to Forth twenty odd years ago. First Forth was Chuck Moore's baby, then it was the child of Forth Inc. Then FIG the Forth Users Interest group re-implemented their own Forth and Forth spread like wildfire, Carl Sassenrath knows this, he helped build a Forth System at one time. However there is an old saying which we at OSCAR would do well to heed. If you've seen one Forth then you've seen one Forth! Yes we have experimental REBOL's and I dare say in future there might be experimental OSCAR's, but remember no matter how much REBOL grows up and leaves home, it is still Carl's baby. REBOL is the standard, OSCAR wants to be REBOL, hence OSCAR: Open Source Code Also REBOL. However at present it is still in it's infancy and to show I've got a light hearted side. OSCAR: Only Stupid "Charlies" Attempting REBOL. PS To prove I want REBOL to succeed and make money, Iam trying to build a REBOL/Power Tools collection which takes inspiration from the O'Reilly UNIX Power Tools classic book. These scripts and functions could form the basis of a REBOL cookbook, after all we all know that REBOL is great for so many tasks on all systems not just Unix. REBOLPress could publish this book and make money for RT this way, I've already suggested this to BO @ REBOL this morning. This is another of my ideas to build a community project. Anyone want to help donate scripts and functions? Anyone want to write the book?. I'm finished now, I'm sorry for this being another one of my sermons, and again I apologize. it's just that iam really passionate about REBOL and it's possibilities, but if you want me to shut up then I will. cheers my fellow REBOL friends, Mark Dickson

OSCAR seemingly creates acronyms recursively. I don't feel polarized by it. Positively or negatively. chaz Always take your work seriously, but never take yourself seriously. At 06:43 AM 2/23/01 EST, you wrote: