So like, if they want me to reverse engineer Dynamicland and make my own, fine. But I’m WAY more likely to misunderstand what it’s about through reverse engineering it than I would be if I had actual source code I could study. I’m sure there’s some truly revelatory stuff in the architecture of RealTalk OS, and a reimplementation would be missing all that.

If what they want is for people to try and reimplement Dynamicland without their guidance, then they’re certainly doing the right things. But if their goal is to convert people to a new way of thinking about computing, this is not a great approach.

I get that impulse because Bret's pretty good about communicating his whole vision and it definitely has a large amount of philosophy attached to it beyond just the tech, but I fear it's more likely to smother the technology and the idea and ensure it doesn't get much adoption. Right now there's not even a space I could go to to check it out it sounds like because the old physical space was shutdown during COVID and the only implementations now are in a handful (or one?) lab. Much less if I had a space and was interested in trying the exploratory computing ideas for museums and education out before building a larger space I've got nothing to work with.

Ultimately trying to tightly control a technology because he wants it to have a particular impact seems like it's just going to ensure it stays a niche demo instead of making and impact at all. If the idea is strong enough people will adopt and adapt it for themselves because it's good.

there's also a much deeper explanation of the why here: https://dynamicland.org/2024/Is_Realtalk_open_source/