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Rubinius, Inc. – A Benefit Company
- Slix 11y agoHow does a benefit company affect things like funding? Or acquisition if the time comes?
- johncolanduoni 11y agoThe description here is pretty good: http://benefitcorp.net http://benefitcorp.net
- Perceptes 11y agoI'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.
- petercooper 11y agoSlightly 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
- sdegutis 11y ago> 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.
- Perceptes 11y agoThough 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.
- steveklabnik 11y agoBacking up hyperpape, here's the word from the horse's mouth https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
- sdegutis 11y agohyperpape makes a good point about this tho
- steveklabnik 11y agoAbsolutely, just providing the citation.
- hyperpape 11y agoThat'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).
- yarrel 11y agoThere 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...
- pjmlp 11y agoTry to apply that model for desktop/native software to average Joe on the street.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> and people should be allowed to profit from their own work without giving it away for free. I'm kind of curious how, even if people are allowed to profit, they'll be able to. Consider Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, and Linux.
- fleitz 11y agoConsider Linux, MySQL, PHP, and then consider Facebook.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- plonh 11y agoFacebook is a scary example. Facebook is 1% open source contributions funded by 99% proprietary walled garden. Scaled down to something like rubinius, the scale fraction would be something like working a proprietary company/job all year and writing some open source on vacation days.
- rectang 11y ago> people should be allowed to profit from their own work By "people", do you mean "developers", or "capital"? As a software developer I am well-compensated compared to people in many other professions, but unless I play the startup lottery I'm as isolated from the investor class as the rest of the proles. Publishing work as open source allows me to get a better ROI than I get working on proprietary code.
- dkarapetyan 11y agoOf course it is. People don't realize that software no matter how good if it is proprietary has a limited shelf-life. It might make you rich in the short term but ultimately it will go into the dustbin of history. That's because software on its own is worthless. It is the people, processes, and institutional knowledge around it that is valuable and once a set of practices and processes is common enough to automate with software the free and open-source version will always win.
- sinatra 11y agoI 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fleitz 11y agoExilir 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)
- sanderjd 11y agoPersonally, I don't find the library gap between ruby/rails and elixir/phoenix for simple web applications to be particularly onerous already, and it will only get better.
- mrinterweb 11y agoNot totally sure what you mean. Elixir will never run rails, but the phoenix framework has some similarities to rails.
- issaria 11y ago> has some similarities to rails. LOL
- dkarapetyan 11y agoI don't think worse is better applies here. There's also JRuby and rubinius is in a weird limbo state where it's not quite Ruby like JRuby and it's not quite another language like Elixir. Similar thing happened to Dart I think. It was stuck in limbo and never got adoption. So between JRuby and Rubinius I choose JRuby because I've used it in the past and it's great. The fact that JRuby folks try super hard to maintain compatibility is also really nice. I want to know who is actually using Rubinius and in what capacity and why.
- cdcarter 11y agoIt'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.
- ksec 11y agoI wonder if the IBM Method JIT CRuby replacement will get any concurrency features.