
MagLev rocks and the planning of the next Ruby shootout - acangiano
http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/05/31/maglev-rocks/
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systems
"A few people objected that it won’t fly, because it’s going to be a
commercial product. I don’t think that’s the case. The Rails community adopts
Macs, TextMate, and other commercial software without blinking"

The Ruby community should be more serious about FOSS, I never liked those
TextMate demos, why not use emacs, netbeans or notepad++ !!! ... well here
comes the day when someone is using the TextMate usage and demos to show how
the Rubyiest are not serious about FOSS ...

I mean the Ruby community acuses Java of many faults, but now Java moved from
closed sourced to being open sourced

Is the Ruby community willing to take Ruby in the opposite direction, are they
willing to move backward!

~~~
acangiano
You raise a very interesting point. I think that in the Ruby and Rails
communities there are plenty of FOSS enthusiasts. Vim, Emacs, RadRails and
Netbeans are all very common options. On the operating system side of things,
Linux is a very common choice as well, despite the fact that many love Mac OS
X.

When I made that remark I was mostly thinking about free as in beer vs.
commercial. I don't think that companies and developers who adopt Rails as
their tool of choice, would have trouble reaching for their wallet, for a
product that significantly enhances their development experience. My remark
was a way of saying that the Rails community has a track record of being able
to pay for quality, be it an operating system, an editor, or hosting, and
therefore won't be adverse to a product that has a price tag.

That said, I think that the communities have a good relationship with the
concept of free as in speech. Many believe in the idea and actively
participate in open source projects. Every other Ruby implementation is open
source, Rails is open source, and almost all the plugins, gems and libraries
out there are free software.

Parts of MagLev will be open source too, and this will probably benefit other
implementations as well, particularly the conceptually not too distant
Rubinius. I think that in the Ruby/Rails community we appreciate FOSS, but we
are also pragmatic and accept the fact that some companies may opt for a
different business model. The two paradigms can coexist, offering users both
FOSS and commercial closed source options.

In this specific case, many Rubyists have been "suffering" due to MRI's
slowness, and if the choice comes down to choosing between having a very slow
implementation that is free, and a closed source one that's 30 times faster,
most companies will accept the closed source compromise, especially when it
comes from a company with a reputation for rock solid and mission critical VMs
and architecture. And I don't feel that they can be blamed for it.

~~~
tx
I believe the effect of MagLev will be marginal. Gemstone/S is charging
$7K/year and it's not the best license they've got. This isn't going to fly in
2008: I like those guys and I am sure they'll find enough banks and airlines
to sell this expensive technology to, but it won't become a popular tool for
most websites: you can't compare it to TextMate, it's not a $40 one-time-
purchase toy, it's your platform - and by getting into a deal like that you
bind yourself to Gemstone possibly forever.

Consider Oracle, it runs circles around MySql in every imaginable category,
but hey - how many people are using it?

Closed source development tools in 2008 are archaic. This is why nearly all
Borland products died off, this is why XCode and Visual Studio express are
free, etc. They will make some money, but at expense of hiding their
technology from 99% of programming population.

If you ask me, it looks a bit shitty: they leveraged open sourced work of
others (Ruby parsers, Rubinius team's work, etc) only to close their own stuff
and have a nice ride charging for it. Capitalism at work.

And besides, DHH is right: MRI is fast enough for most practical purposes and
this is what I'll continue using.

~~~
acangiano
It's obvious that many of the existing Ruby implementations will continue to
be adopted, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. It is also my
understanding that they intend to adopt a business model in which they'd have
a free version (that will suffice for most people's needs) as well, and they
plan to make commercial versions affordable. But we don't know what they're
going to charge yet, so it's really just speculation at this point.

They are going to release the Ruby parts as Open Source and it's not set in
stone that they're going to keep the VM closed either. However, if they choose
not to make it FOSS, it's very unlikely that MagLev will become the single
most popular choice. That said, companies pay a lot of money in hardware and
hosting fees, so if the speed claims were to be true, many companies would
have no qualms about paying for a much faster implementation. It's not going
to be everyone's cup of tea, but it's a choice, and choices are usually good.

