On a less positive note. The professors who originally developed
it at Dartmouth could never quite see there way clear to open
source it. True BASIC? pshaw :).
Yes, well, universities have always been all about the money.
There was a time when I would
have loved to run BASIC on linux, bsd, then Mac and have it be
consistent across the platforms, other than as a curiosity, that
time has gone.
Not so much. Bywater Basic (bwbasic), which is a much-extended clone of GW-Basic, and a clone of Commodore-64 Basic (cbmbasic) are both open source, TTY-oriented, and portable to most operating systems and Windows. There are lots of other Basics around: see <
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects>.