I think it’s tight partly because people have been around a long time, partly because there’s never been an endless September, and partly because most of the places we hang out “real names” are used so that leads to a lot more general politeness (although some folk still like to troll from time to time.)
There’s some open-source (Mark has posted a bunch of stuff MarkGoldberg’s gists · GitHub), Randy Rogers posted his work (💫 Randy Rogers, Devuna - Code base available to the Clarion community), ClarionLive has a bunch of open source at https://www.clarionlive.com/Utilities.Htm) and there’s a fair bit of other stuff around as well.
That said Open Source in Clarion has the exact same issues of Open Source in any language - albeit at a much (much) smaller scale; there’s a lack of developers interested in contributing, maintenance takes time and work, and ultimately programmers have to balance “what they get paid for” versus “stuff they do for free”. If you look at the time folk like John, Arnold and Mike invest in ClarionLive and helping the community on a weekly basis, or the time Mark (all of them) spend on Skype answering questions and so on, then you can’t begrudge them not spending more of their time on free tools as well.
From my point of view we wanted to make sure our stuff is sustainable - that it gets documented, gets examples, gets updated (all things open source are weak at) - and that means it needs to generate revenue. At the same time almost all our products are shipped as source code that anyone can read (and we’ve been in a process to remove compiled DLL’s from the rest as much as is possible.)
Personally, for me (with the CapeSoft hat on now), I think it’s also valuable to have properly supported code, with all the benefits of being able to read, edit and contribute to it - which can be used (long term) in commercial applications, which is supported via direct financial contributions (aka purchases). It’s a model which seems to have served the community well up to now and seems to merge the best advantages of open-source with a long-term sustainable development path.
Frankly, the compiler is probably not the hard bit. The hard bit are the runtime libraries, including the file drivers. You’d need both for it to be useful. Ideally with the runtime libraries written in Clarion itself which would then make the whole lot very platform-portable.
Of course this would be a huge project to undertake - something which it seems the community simply does not have the resources to undertake. It’s a pity that this isn’t the case, but sometimes realities are just realities.
Cheers
Bruce