3 ms·

I think the core rails team is pretty small and focused. The benefit of it being open source is that an army of people wanting to make a name for themselves ar

I think the core rails team is pretty small and focused. The benefit of it being open source is that an army of people wanting to make a name for themselves are combing over their code to make sure all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed. The quality of Rails obviously doesn't scale with the number of contributors - there are only a few core contributors and a heckuvalot of casual contributors. Makes sense to me. So it's not about incremental increases in product quality, it's about responding to problems quickly and promoting new core developers from the community, rather than through Microsoft's opaque hiring processes. I'm relatively new to web development, and I've never worked in an enterprise environment using enterprise software/frameworks, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone given the choice and assuming the cash is the same would choose to go the MS route. I admit naïveté.

kenjackson 16y ago
I'm relatively new to web development, and I've never worked in an enterprise environment using enterprise software/frameworks, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone given the choice and assuming the cash is the same would choose to go the MS route. I admit naïveté. A lot of reasons. The big reason is that for a LOT of people, open source isn't all that compelling as a feature on its own. For certain classes of people its the most important thing in the world, for other people it doesn't add much value. And for maybe an equally large subset, it's actually a negative. At the end of the day each person/org has to decide what is important to them and optimize accordingly. For you open source may be the most important thing in the world, in which case, the choice is obvious. But there are millions of people who have made a different decision.
- bad_user 16y ago
  I agree with you but having to choose between 2 similar products, going with the one that's open-source is a no-brainer in most cases. If a lot of people don't go with that route is mostly because of inertia or just bad uninformed choices, the idiotic kind of stuff that can drag your company into the ground. It's not the license, it's the side effects: the ability to fix it yourself, community, popularity, documentation available (thanks O'Reilly) and support (the real deal). I'm trying to picture what would happen if a customer calls in the middle of the night because the shit hit the fan and I blame it on Microsoft. As it is right now, the small company I work for has hired a kernel hacker and a contributer to Mysql that used to work for Sun, while also maintaining a healthy relationship with some of the core devs of the tools we rely upon ... we can fix and extend anything in our stack. Can Microsoft provided support top that? I don't think so.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    but having to choose between 2 similar products, going with the one that's open-source is a no-brainer in most cases. Is it? First, you have to define "similar". Would you rather have Quake (open source) or Black Ops? Both shooters with zombie like monsters. Is MySQL the same as the SQL Server? Sure, to the uninitiated they look the same, but there are lots of little differences that, depending on your goals, can make one vastly more valuable than the other. Would you prefer Mono or the CLR? While Mono has an enthusiastic and strong dev community, I bet dollars to donuts that even among informed devs, most would chose the CLR for the job at hand. And I bet even among informed CIOs they'd prefer the CLR for their shops. OpenOffice Calc or Excel? Again, depending on your usage scenario, there are things you can do in Excel that simply aren't there in a reasonable way in Calc, although again, to the unitiated they're both spreadsheets. My point? You rarely have the option of choosing between a closed source version and open source version of identical products. What you do tend to do is to look at two (or more products) and figure out what addresses your need the most, with open source being one of many metrics. When I decide which spreadsheet for my org to use, of course we consider OpenOffice, but the fact that it is open source has very little impact on our decision. The probability of us fixing a bug in OpenOffice is about equal to the chance that the bug fixes it self through the right sequence of bits being affected by cosmic ray. But maybe for you the fact that you can go and implement missing features in OpenOffice is important.
lhnn 16y ago
The first question when I suggest ANY piece of software at ALL in my 'enterprise': "Is it supported? Who supports it? Is the support 24x7?" $10,000 a month, depending on the applicatin, is chump change. Although, some people do appreciate the value of open-source when a vendor takes two months to solve a problem in their proprietary mess of 'software solutions'.

kenjackson 16y ago

I'm relatively new to web development, and I've never worked in an enterprise environment using enterprise software/frameworks, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone given the choice and assuming the cash is the same would choose to go the MS route. I admit naïveté. A lot of reasons. The big reason is that for a LOT of people, open source isn't all that compelling as a feature on its own. For certain classes of people its the most important thing in the world, for other people it doesn't add much value. And for maybe an equally large subset, it's actually a negative. At the end of the day each person/org has to decide what is important to them and optimize accordingly. For you open source may be the most important thing in the world, in which case, the choice is obvious. But there are millions of people who have made a different decision.

bad_user 16y ago
I agree with you but having to choose between 2 similar products, going with the one that's open-source is a no-brainer in most cases. If a lot of people don't go with that route is mostly because of inertia or just bad uninformed choices, the idiotic kind of stuff that can drag your company into the ground. It's not the license, it's the side effects: the ability to fix it yourself, community, popularity, documentation available (thanks O'Reilly) and support (the real deal). I'm trying to picture what would happen if a customer calls in the middle of the night because the shit hit the fan and I blame it on Microsoft. As it is right now, the small company I work for has hired a kernel hacker and a contributer to Mysql that used to work for Sun, while also maintaining a healthy relationship with some of the core devs of the tools we rely upon ... we can fix and extend anything in our stack. Can Microsoft provided support top that? I don't think so.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  but having to choose between 2 similar products, going with the one that's open-source is a no-brainer in most cases. Is it? First, you have to define "similar". Would you rather have Quake (open source) or Black Ops? Both shooters with zombie like monsters. Is MySQL the same as the SQL Server? Sure, to the uninitiated they look the same, but there are lots of little differences that, depending on your goals, can make one vastly more valuable than the other. Would you prefer Mono or the CLR? While Mono has an enthusiastic and strong dev community, I bet dollars to donuts that even among informed devs, most would chose the CLR for the job at hand. And I bet even among informed CIOs they'd prefer the CLR for their shops. OpenOffice Calc or Excel? Again, depending on your usage scenario, there are things you can do in Excel that simply aren't there in a reasonable way in Calc, although again, to the unitiated they're both spreadsheets. My point? You rarely have the option of choosing between a closed source version and open source version of identical products. What you do tend to do is to look at two (or more products) and figure out what addresses your need the most, with open source being one of many metrics. When I decide which spreadsheet for my org to use, of course we consider OpenOffice, but the fact that it is open source has very little impact on our decision. The probability of us fixing a bug in OpenOffice is about equal to the chance that the bug fixes it self through the right sequence of bits being affected by cosmic ray. But maybe for you the fact that you can go and implement missing features in OpenOffice is important.

lhnn 16y ago

The first question when I suggest ANY piece of software at ALL in my 'enterprise': "Is it supported? Who supports it? Is the support 24x7?" $10,000 a month, depending on the applicatin, is chump change. Although, some people do appreciate the value of open-source when a vendor takes two months to solve a problem in their proprietary mess of 'software solutions'.