I've been taking a meditative retreat...finding some solace in being able to code in peace, and think. I have more to do on that.
But I have come to some clarity about what has to happen. A lot of things are in the plan... including apologizing to Nick. Yet that impasse is under the umbrella of a shift which has been a long time coming, but kept being put off. It's time to take the necessary actions to put it into place...
That is to basically say goodbye-for-good to the "historical" Rebol community (by which I am referring to rebolforum.com, rebol.org, rebol.com, etc... not the attendees of the Philadelphia conference or users of this site who choose to participate). It means re-launching Ren-C under a formal project name... where it will build on its merits fully independent of association with Rebol.
I'm also going to merge in a major critical feature I've been working on, that will only be incorporated once a license change is in effect. The new license will be my favored one for a project of this nature: Lesser GPL (LGPL) 3...which is compatible with subsuming Apache 2 code due to incorporating its patent clauses (note that LGPL 2 is not compatible).
The license change is obviously not retroactive. So Ren-C as developed prior to the new feature will remain Apache 2 (except for the JavaScript extension, which was LGPL...note the web Repl was not developed in the Ren-C repository and was made LGPL as well). It goes without saying that the Ren-C codebase will be frozen in time--as I will no longer make contributions under Apache 2. But if someone like Carl (or Oldes) wanted to pick over the code for ideas from 2015-2019 to copy/paste bits into R3-Alpha without concern, that's where they would look.
While LGPL may be a license that inhibits some forms of commercial adoption, I'm not concerned about those cases or users. I (re-)learned my lesson sufficiently from dealing with the Rebol open sourcing discussion--everyone who barked about how much they wanted their ability for closed-source use vanished. The only reason not to change the license would be to slog on with Ren-C's five year hope for unity with Rebol and facilitating code to be taken back under R3-Alpha's license.
(When it comes to the license, I'm not blaming Carl. Do note in his initial announcement about open-sourcing he said he would "most likely" use GPL2, which is more restrictive than LGPL3 for most practical purposes. It was listening to his community that gave the result. Now it's too late to go back--note I'm not choosing v.3 because I particularly care about the anti-"Tivoization" clauses, but because I can't make an Apache 2 project (L)GPL2 due to the patent clauses, which are truthfully more important.)
There are other changes in process and procedure that will be coming with this. I'm more certain about what those changes will be than I am about what timeline they will be on. So it's really just going to be a matter of seeing what happens, in what order. Really, here in the end times, we have to focus on where we can actually have an impact.
So everyone be sure to thank @gchiu for his efforts on the coronavirus, in NZ and globally.