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Rebol was closed source back when open source was really starting to take off with Perl and Linux. It is seriously cool (I agree), but the interpreter is a little slow.

Red still has a little ways to go, but could be a game changer some day. The project is insanely ambitious, but I'm optimistic.

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The main (IMO sad) reason REBOL sits in a weird half-life position of "not quite dead, but..." is that, while REBOL Core is open, the GUI parts (which are crossplatform, and run on Linux) are still closed source.

It's a bit like .NET Core. Great to base a business on... not so great to tinker around with. Arguably the second (tinkering, learning) comes before the first (using what you've learned to build a business).

Mildly infuriating...

Just to clarify it's Rebol 2 (Core/etc) that is closed source.

Rebol 3 is open-sourced along with the GUI (R3-GUI)....

* https://github.com/rebol/rebol

* https://github.com/metaeducation/ren-c (community fork)

* https://github.com/zsx/r3-gui (Atronix fork)

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