Whatever Rebol code you wrote for the dongle could easily be read by devious miscreant ne'er-do-wells. People trying to sell expensive Rebol products may be frustrated by Rebol's open-ness. Some commercial systems are so large and complex and ever changing that they dont fear customers having the source, since if the user wasn't registered they wouldn't get the constant flow of bugfixes and support they need to keep the blasted monstrosity going. Also big corporate customers tend to play by the book and buy most of their software and are much more reliable in this way than the typical individual user for personal use. Small software that just works would however be copied endlessly without protection, is my guess. I like free sw as much as the next guy, but it is harder for people to find time to volunteer rather than time that earns them income, to work on a software project. Linux is pretty amazing, but not all sw is going to be developed that way. The vast majority of people bought their Linux from somebody, like RedHat, who bundles it with apps and so on... If sw is all that you do and you don't have some other way to make money, then your sw work has got to pay or you starve. We still don't seem to have a way to bridge the gap between commercial production where all is paid and owned and controlled and re-inventing the wheel and dominating the market, and freeware cooperatives where it is friendly and less controlling but where no one gets monetary recompense. So, what else is new? >===== Original Message From [EMAIL PROTECTED] ===== >[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> Yes, I know - as Dave Haynie said - he left mainly because Scala got too >> much tied to Windows. It uses DirectX IIRC. But do you remember those >> glory days of Amiga and its chipset? Scala running very very smoothly on >> such underpowered (by today standards) piece of hw. And what? Was it >> bigger than 500 kb? And scala presentation was just script. > >The script was a 'dialect' called Lingua >It is the best practical example of what a 'dialect' is that I can think >of. > >> And it had >> network capabilities too. > >Ahh, but not nearly as cool as Rebol's... > > >Hey, with serial: support, it is possible to make a platform-independent >dongle for high-value products... > >Steve Shireman > >(maybe Steven Wright knew lisp...) > >"...when I talk and sometimes you can't here me, it is because sometimes >I am in parentheses..." Steven Wright
