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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 l

by tx 18y ago

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 18y ago
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.

by tx 18y ago

acangiano 18y ago

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.