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Red requires Rebol 2, which is proprietary; Red does not require (and, in fact, does not work with) Rebol 3.

However, Rebol 3 (and it's active descendant Ren-C) bootstraps itself; it does not require Rebol 2.

You've probably forgotten but at one stage the red.r script was ported to ren-c.

For what it's worth, only 1/4 of the toolchain (Red → Red/System compiler and Red/System → native compiler + loader/linker) depends on Rebol2, which in turn is 90% compatible with Red.

Red will be self hosted at some point. I know they're working towards it, so it shouldn't put you off forever.