
Rubinius, Inc. – A Benefit Company - kyledrake
http://rubini.us/2015/10/27/rubinius-inc-a-benefit-company/
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sinatra
I feel bringing concurrency to Ruby (what Rubinius is trying to do) is going
to be harder than bringing Ruby to concurrency (what Elixir is trying to do).
Adding Ruby-like syntax on top of fundamentals like functional programming,
immutability, etc (which are naturally suited for concurrency) sounds like a
better approach to me. Would love to hear others' opinion.

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fleitz
Exilir is exactly the better approach, sadly worse is better, so rubinius is
the approach that will get the most adoption.

(Unless exilir compatibility with rails approaches that of rubinius)

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adamkittelson
Will it? My knee-jerk reaction to this was that Elixir already has more
adoption than Rubinius, but then I stopped paying attention to Rubinius years
ago. Do people use it for real stuff?

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matthewrudy
I agree.

Elixir is already being pickup up for real projects but I feel like Rubinius
has only ever been a play thing.

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Perceptes
I'm interested to see how Brian will approach a business model built on open
source. The most common ways to do it (selling a "pro" version of software
that is closed source, running a hosted version, or selling support) all fall
short for me in various ways. I'd love to see an approach that maintains the
user's privacy and control.

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petercooper
Slightly related, the Phusion guys (who made Passenger) did a keynote at OSCON
today on that very topic:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpyRlaWmZg4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpyRlaWmZg4)

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Slix
How does a benefit company affect things like funding? Or acquisition if the
time comes?

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johncolanduoni
The description here is pretty good:
[http://benefitcorp.net](http://benefitcorp.net)

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cdcarter
It's too bad they didn't choose to pursue the full on B Corp Certification. In
many jurisdictions, benefit corp is just a box you tick.

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ksec
I wonder if the IBM Method JIT CRuby replacement will get any concurrency
features.

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sdegutis
> Open source is the future

Open source is great, and it has its place. But it's not _the future_. Healthy
competition drives innovation behind closed doors, and people should be
allowed to profit from their own work without giving it away for free.

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Perceptes
Though it may often be, open source software does not have to be free of cost.
As the FSF says: free as freedom, not free as in beer.

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hyperpape
That's true, but not enough--you have to explain how that enables a revenue
model for a modern company. How many companies make money selling open source
software (not support, not feature development, not proprietary forks based on
copyright assignment) without using the Red Hat model?

The FSF point about charging for distribution seems to be mostly an artifact
of the time before software distribution was commoditized/made free.

(Same goes for SteveKlabnik below).

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yarrel
There are any number of ways to get paid for your labour as a hacker.

1\. Charge for running the service. 2\. Take a cut of transactions over the
service. 3\. Charge for feature additions. 4\. Charge for
installation/configuration/support/maintainance. 5\. Patreon-style support
(including Patreon). 6\. Sell physical media & merchandise (don't laugh, ask a
band).

etc.

Now, about how proprietary software companies can ever hope to compete with
Google even if they don't lose all their revenue to piracy...

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cwyers
Most of those aren't getting paid for your labor as a hacker, which is to say,
a programmer. They're getting paid for support, for ops, for server time --
number 3 is the only one that directly pertains to writing code. So you can
monetize ancilliary activities, but the act of giving source code away for
free devalues the act of actually writing source code and makes it difficult
to monetize the writing of source code itself, not the ancilliaries.

