REBOL to go open-source

[Posted September 25, 2012 by corbet]

The developer behind the REBOL language has announced his intention to release the code under (probably) the GPLv2 license. "The time has come for REBOL to be released as open source. This is the only way I can see it regaining some degree of momentum and renewed interest -- not just within our REBOL community, but for many yet-to-be users who possess the curiosity or motivation to learn new and powerful programming concepts and techniques."

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 25, 2012 19:53 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

First time I hear of this, and by the website it looks intriguing. But the R3 3.0 alpha is extremely bare-bones, no real examples or intelligible documentation to be found. It all has a look of something done by someone who quickly got bored and went to do other stuff before really starting anything (i.e., the introduction to the language is a (short) page, with a Next button that leads nowhere at all).

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 25, 2012 19:59 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (1 responses)

They should have done this in the 90s .. now it is mostly pointless, but cool anyways.

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Dec 15, 2012 3:01 UTC (Sat) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link]

Yup. What looks like happened is the one man operation got bogged down in a major rewrite and realized it would never be finished by himself. So he tossed it over the wall and is now hoping the magic fairy dust, that he doesn't like and distrusts, will still come through and finish getting a working updated version of his pet language finished.

Note that there is no source release of the stable version, it is strictly a quid pro quo deal, you open source folks want this ya gotta bail me out.

Looks like an interesting langage but still not seeing why I'd pick it. The graphic subsystem is less useful than Tk and the language isn't really better than tcl, just different. Lacking a serious modern compiler I really doubt it would execute code faster than tcl but admit I haven't had time to even try benchmarking it.

Again, the langauge has apparently been around a long time but as a closed one person vanity project it couldn't harness the community like tcl, perl, python, etc. could and it shows badly. It would require a lot of effort to bring up to scratch and the argument isn't compelling. Worse it doesn't have the vast external libraries to compete with perl, python, php, etc.

Do like the single self contained executable that consumes less than 5MB of total vss to get to a command prompt. So it does have the advantage of being very well suited to small environments.... but we are quickly hitting a point where arm machines have loads of ram because somebody thought java apps would be a good idea for phones.

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 25, 2012 20:52 UTC (Tue) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]

Neat. REBOL has been around forever, but it has been a backwater due to its license.

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 25, 2012 20:59 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

I'm glad to hear from Carl -- he went over a year without updating his blog, and I was beginning to wonder if everything was OK.

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 25, 2012 22:15 UTC (Tue) by lmb (subscriber, #39048) [Link]

"Although it is unrealistic to assume we can filter/fix all impurities that might come about in an open environment [...]" He certainly has an opinion ;-)

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 26, 2012 0:50 UTC (Wed) by cyanit (guest, #86671) [Link] (2 responses)

Wasn't this that thing that promised to be the best thing since sliced bread, bring a wholly new revolutionary paradigm, usher a new age of Internet buzzthingies, and of course delivered none of these?

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 26, 2012 2:04 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Wow. I've checked their gallery: http://www.rebol.com/reblets.html

They REALLY REALLY need to hire someone with UI design skills above that of a color-blind 7-year old.

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 26, 2012 3:45 UTC (Wed) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link]

For 2001 that was downright tasteful.

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 26, 2012 6:41 UTC (Wed) by h4ck3rm1k3 (guest, #86841) [Link] (1 responses)

Good to hear,
I looked into this before and fought over the wikipedia page because it was not clearly marked as proprietary :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REBOL

If you want a laugh, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:REBOL check the talk page.

I was interested in this because some "open source" projects use rebol.

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 26, 2012 7:32 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I had a look and I have news for you. For most of the world, 'proprietary' does not mean 'regarded as non-free by the FSF'.

REBOL to go open-source

Posted Sep 26, 2012 14:04 UTC (Wed) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]

There's already a REBOL-inspired open source language development project underway at http://www.red-lang.org/. I suspect the announcement of Red in 2011 was one of the precipitating factors in REBOL finally going open source.