8 ms·

Bruce Perens: Building a 'billion dollar' startup with Crystal and Lucky [video]

45 points by zdw 5y ago

cpach 5y ago
tl;dr anyone? (Pretty please)
- georgeam 5y ago
  I've listened to only 2/3 of it, but: he promotes Crystal+Lucky (crystal is compiled) as good replacements for Ruby and Rails. The second part of his talk is about promoting a new variant of open license called PostOpen, which will require commercial users of Post Open software to pay 1% for using, 1.5% for using without sharing modifications. There is a 10% fee for worse offense. All percentages are percentages of revenue. This is partly aimed at large companies that host open source software with few modifications as a service and charge for it. Money goes to PostOpen and possibly conventional Open Source developers.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Ah, so a linux system contains more than 100 packages, does that mean if it used this scheme companies would have to pay out >100% of revenue? Colour me unconvinced of the viability of this scheme.
    - radarsat1 5y ago
      leftpad intensifies
    - jhauris 5y ago
      No, and this is expressly discussed in TFV. It's a flat 1% regardless of how many "post open source" resources are used. This is intended to encourage adoption of more POS (unfortunate acronym) once you use any.
      - bawolff 5y ago
        Well if people want their ideas to be heard they need to write them down instead burying them in long videos amidst topics i dont care about. (Not blaming bruce, we're not the target audience here, but im still not watching a long form video). I still think its a weird business model. I can't imagine any propriatary software would work with that. Its very discouraging for small projects that do simple things, or for companies that want to try out software a little at first before committing to using it at a large scale.
  - prepend 5y ago
    I think any license that requires a percentage of revenue is DOA. First because involving all the chicanery of accounting to figure out my fee is asking for lots of resources just to calculate and audit fees. Second, unpredictable costs are bad. If my company’s revenue doubles in a year, that doesn’t mean that my department’s budget doubles. Or that I even have enough earnings to cover licenses. Finally, this is hard enough with a single product. My org uses thousands of products. If they all charge 1%, where does that leave me. PS- morally this just seems dumb. If my grocery store charged me more or less depending on my income or the value I derive from a tomato, I won’t shop there. Just publish a price and let people decide to buy or not.
    - ThrowawayR2 5y ago
      That's not correct. It's a flat 1% of revenue regardless of the number of Post-Open software packages used. (From the slide at 13:30 "The same fee whether you use 1 Post Open program or 1000.") The organization that receives the payment is supposed to handle splitting up the revenue among software package authors, so it does require auditing of all usage.
      - prepend 5y ago
        That helps with my final point but #1 and #2 are deal killers as well. This also places an undue burden on the payment receiver as they have to get into the business of running enterprise audits to find out who is using what.
    - toast0 5y ago
      Yeah, I don't know what corporation would be happy with a license where the cost is nebulous like this. I would suspect lots of Hollywood Accounting is likely; putting all the PostOpen software in a subsidiary that has no revenue, or developing your own software under PostOpen but not distributing it outside, so that the majority of the usage is apportioned to affiliated companies. Plus, apportioning by usage is a negative incentive for optimization. If your DB reduces query runtime by 10% in the next version, it reduces its revenue, assuming other PostOpen software is in use and doesn't optimize.
    - 5y ago
  - johnebgd 5y ago
    I see a low probability that anything licensed "post open" will see adoption if there is a royalty owed for it.
    - dbcurtis 5y ago
      Imagine the business decision of selecting between a post-open licensed ware and BSD licensed similar functionality. In return for 1% of revenue and the hassle of an annual usage audit, you get what value in return, exactly? That is the key question. So as a purveyor of post-open software, you must have a business proposition that closes the deal. Not impossible, but different from the way most OSS projects operate today. Your skepticism is reasonable. To separate a customer from their money, you need to provide obvious value. It strikes me that once you take one post-open package into your stack, the incremental cost of the next N is zero. So maybe there is enough virality in that feature to drive adoption. One high-value post-open project could create a coat-tail effect.
- Azrael3000 5y ago
  I just skimmed the video so my TL;DR might not capture everything he said. Basically, he advocates a new license that he wants to develop that basically improves remuneration for open source developers. Use case: A "Post Open" software is used by a company, then this company has to pay a certain percentage (1 to 10%) of their revenue to the "Post Open" software. If it is using multiple "Post Open" packages this percentage is divided among them (according to usage). Software in this scheme will be allowed to be modified, redistributed etc. and it will also contain a public API that defines the boundaries of the program (so it's not about linking anymore). I hope that captures the key points.
  - dbcurtis 5y ago
    Pretty good summary. Clarification: for-profit users pay a percentage of end user revenue. non-profits and individuals pay nothing. Automated auditing envisioned. This is a proposal, not nearly ready for roll-out. The concepts are interesting, but only a rough framework exists at this time. The ideas are worth discussing. I wish there was a succinct blog post or something about them rather than this painful video.
  - ThrowawayR2 5y ago
    There's a couple of other points of note: - Usage auditing for and reporting for Post-Open software is required alongside the payment. This is a huge reversal. Not having to do onerous license compliance monitoring was a big selling point touted by FOSS advocates for the past two decades, pointing to horror stories about audits demanded by the Business Software Alliance and huge payments for license violations. - It's called the "Post-Open" license for a reason: Bruce says FOSS has been defeated. He points out that corporations have both found ways to make money off of FOSS without contributing much and even hijacked the governance of FOSS for their own benefit. This is extremely startling to hear from someone so well known in open source.
  - tytso 5y ago
    What's unclear is how is the revenue percentage split across all of the various contributors of a particular "post open" package. Suppose there are 10 "Post Open" packages; do all of the packages deserve to get an equal share of the 1% rev share? Maybe some "post open" packages are more technically complex than others? Maybe some "post open" packages are more key to the value-add than others. Even if there is only a single "post open" package which gets the full 1% of the rev share, what about one developer which contributes a whitespace or spelling fix, versus another developer which contributes a key part of the package? What if one developer contributes a huge number of lines of code, but it's for a feature which isn't actually used at all by a particular billion dollar use case of said "post open" package? The devil is really in the details.....
detaro 5y ago
Title doesnt match video title, intentional?
- cpach 5y ago
  The submitted title (now changed) was probably a summary of what 'zdw thought was the most interesting take-home from the video.
tzs 5y ago
It seems to be at about 7:51 that he starts talking about the problems he sees with current open source. Here's a link to that point in the video [1]. Around 12:47 is where he finishes that and concludes we cannot fix open source, and talks about "Post Open". Here's a link to that point in the video [2]. [1] https://youtu.be/XRl-it1-ruI?t=471 https://youtu.be/XRl-it1-ruI?t=471 [2] https://youtu.be/XRl-it1-ruI?t=767 https://youtu.be/XRl-it1-ruI?t=767
chromatin 5y ago
Well, the audio video quality is terrible, but the message -- in the second half, you have to power through a bunch of stuff about Crystal and Lucky -- is very interesting. He describes his vision for "post open source" license, which he is currently developing. His goals seem to be to to empower software developers to take back power from megacorps which have in his view subverted the nature of open source and turned it into a "resource extraction" scheme.
- mfer 5y ago
  I think there is a struggle between open source, having a viable business, and having a VC backed business. Folks aren't working that out well. VC backed businesses are different from viable businesses in that a viable business needs to be able to make money to pay expenses and operate while VC backed businesses need to make returns on investments for the VCs. For open-source projects that are the top level (e.g., PostreSQL) and being paid to work on it... it's often useful to have an enterprise market and support model. Side note, open source works better business model wise when things are more distributed. More centralized with megacorp clouds is harder for open source based businesses. For libraries that can be used by many projects, open source is a great way to go. I've done semver, vcs, and other libs this way. They aren't the business thing being sold but enablers of other things being build. Interfaces are great and we need more standard interfaces. They make is possible to have open source and proprietary solutions that work with the same stuff. Businesses can compete and work with more freedom to do so with open interfaces. Businesses trying to have an open source software SaaS that they run in public clouds are always going to be at a disadvantage. The public cloud provider can always do it cheaper and undercut the business. Businesses that try to go that route will end up having business issues. Physical products are another space all together. It's the thing (hardware + software) that make it work. Open source software is great there, too. I see it in the car I drive. Where we license things as open source should be coupled to our thought out business models. It's not an open source or post open source world. It's about the right tool for the job in front of us. We need more thought and talk on that.
- JoshTriplett 5y ago
  Another way of saying "post open source" is "not open source", or "proprietary". But, of course, those wouldn't get as much traction as trading on the good name of Open Source. We already have some copyleft licenses that prevent the kinds of proprietary SaaS usage that have prompted recent complaints. People and projects don't use those licenses; they use permissive licenses, and then get surprised when companies use their software under those permissive licenses. I've even seen people complain that if they use copyleft licenses, large companies won't touch their software. That's entirely the point! If you want companies to pay for an alternative license or an exception, you have to choose an Open Source license that they're not already willing to work with. Before we even consider giving up on the Schelling point that is Open Source, perhaps we should make better use of the full spectrum of Open Source licenses we already have.
Proven 5y ago
For me it's very simple - when I see GPL 3, I move on - even for personal uses. I can't imagine why I'd want anything to do with this license either. It's an unnecessary burden. Just stay away from it.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Why is GPL 3 objectionable for personal uses?
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    The completely serious answer is that some have turned this into a religion. GPL software is simply impure to them, so they won't touch it.
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      Which brings us to the question: would we be here if there had been no GPL at all?
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        No we wouldn't. The UNIX world and Windows would keep taking BSD code, assuming the court case would have ended the same way as it did, and that was it. The GPL haters tend to forget that GCC was pretty much ignored until Sun started the trend to split UNIX into user and developer editions, and without GNU there wouldn't be a userland for Linus to plug into Linux. Whatever, all UNIX clones that came after Linux (specially for IoT) are BSD/MIT based, so the long term roadmap is already quite obvious.
  - Proven 5y ago
    Because I have to mind the license. Let's say today it's just for personal use. I modify it to work the way I want it, then 2 months later I decide to provide its output on my Web site. Now I have to publish the source code that includes modifications I've made. It's a burden in terms of both labor and time - I must perform this work against my will and for free because of GPL 3.0. I need to remove hard-coded parameters and arguments from scripts for security and privacy reasons, I need to create a repo and update it every time my code changes, etc. Why would I want to do that? Another example would be if I ever decided to use that code as part of my application and decide to share my application (even with friends, for free), now I either have to rewrite or replace the GPL 3.0 component, or else I have no choice but to force everyone downstream to use GPL 3.0. Some can't, some won't - to these folks, my app would be completely useless. If, on the other hand, I find a permissively licensed 3rd party program, library or script, I don't have to worry about it now or in the future, whether I run it on my own site, mix it with other code, or decide to share it with anyone.
xrayarx 5y ago
Already posted 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961414
- tomhoward 5y ago
  It's not a dupe if the earlier submission had no front page time and discussion.
Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
Your regular reminder that there is already a permissive licence that effectively prevents use by megacorps: WTFPL. Google won’t touch software licensed with it and Intel have also refused it in the past. And yes, you can add a “no warranty” disclaimer in your readme too.
- vintagedave 5y ago
  > a permissive licence that effectively prevents use by megacorps _Why_ do mega corps like Google and Intel refuse to use it? There's nothing on Wikipedia [0], and the license is extremely short and clear. From your description I expected a license that explicitly denies permissions for certain purposes or types of companies. It's very much the opposite of that! :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
- BrucePerens 5y ago
  If it's not meant more as a joke than anything else, it should be.
throw7 5y ago
This kinda seems like it's creating a tweaked ASCAP or BMI regime for "postopen" developers. I'm not sure what to think of that at this moment.
qnsi 5y ago
Can someone share their opinion about Crystal? Is there a legitimate chance it will be used by startups in the future? The other part is interesting, but Crystal got my attention a lot
- otoburb 5y ago
  Ruby is still very popular, and Crystal's syntax is heavily inspired (i.e. very familiar) by Ruby. This is similar to Julia's approach of making the language syntactically familiar with MATLAB. If a bunch of startups continue to love Ruby's initial expressiveness and productivity (early code write & read cycles), then unless Ruby improves on similar dimensions then Crystal adoption may pick up. Of course, Crystal's adoption could be stopped if Ruby (and Rails) improves on the dimensions that Bruce Perens mentioned in his video; namely correctness, reliability and efficiency. Supposedly, Crystal is supposed to be faster, more reliable and just-as-efficient-to-write given the syntactic similarities that many developers love about Ruby.

45 points by zdw 5y ago

cpach 5y ago

tl;dr anyone? (Pretty please)

georgeam 5y ago
I've listened to only 2/3 of it, but: he promotes Crystal+Lucky (crystal is compiled) as good replacements for Ruby and Rails. The second part of his talk is about promoting a new variant of open license called PostOpen, which will require commercial users of Post Open software to pay 1% for using, 1.5% for using without sharing modifications. There is a 10% fee for worse offense. All percentages are percentages of revenue. This is partly aimed at large companies that host open source software with few modifications as a service and charge for it. Money goes to PostOpen and possibly conventional Open Source developers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bawolff 5y ago
  Ah, so a linux system contains more than 100 packages, does that mean if it used this scheme companies would have to pay out >100% of revenue? Colour me unconvinced of the viability of this scheme.
  - radarsat1 5y ago
    leftpad intensifies
  - jhauris 5y ago
    No, and this is expressly discussed in TFV. It's a flat 1% regardless of how many "post open source" resources are used. This is intended to encourage adoption of more POS (unfortunate acronym) once you use any.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      Well if people want their ideas to be heard they need to write them down instead burying them in long videos amidst topics i dont care about. (Not blaming bruce, we're not the target audience here, but im still not watching a long form video). I still think its a weird business model. I can't imagine any propriatary software would work with that. Its very discouraging for small projects that do simple things, or for companies that want to try out software a little at first before committing to using it at a large scale.
- prepend 5y ago
  I think any license that requires a percentage of revenue is DOA. First because involving all the chicanery of accounting to figure out my fee is asking for lots of resources just to calculate and audit fees. Second, unpredictable costs are bad. If my company’s revenue doubles in a year, that doesn’t mean that my department’s budget doubles. Or that I even have enough earnings to cover licenses. Finally, this is hard enough with a single product. My org uses thousands of products. If they all charge 1%, where does that leave me. PS- morally this just seems dumb. If my grocery store charged me more or less depending on my income or the value I derive from a tomato, I won’t shop there. Just publish a price and let people decide to buy or not.
  - ThrowawayR2 5y ago
    That's not correct. It's a flat 1% of revenue regardless of the number of Post-Open software packages used. (From the slide at 13:30 "The same fee whether you use 1 Post Open program or 1000.") The organization that receives the payment is supposed to handle splitting up the revenue among software package authors, so it does require auditing of all usage.
    - prepend 5y ago
      That helps with my final point but #1 and #2 are deal killers as well. This also places an undue burden on the payment receiver as they have to get into the business of running enterprise audits to find out who is using what.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Yeah, I don't know what corporation would be happy with a license where the cost is nebulous like this. I would suspect lots of Hollywood Accounting is likely; putting all the PostOpen software in a subsidiary that has no revenue, or developing your own software under PostOpen but not distributing it outside, so that the majority of the usage is apportioned to affiliated companies. Plus, apportioning by usage is a negative incentive for optimization. If your DB reduces query runtime by 10% in the next version, it reduces its revenue, assuming other PostOpen software is in use and doesn't optimize.
  - 5y ago
- johnebgd 5y ago
  I see a low probability that anything licensed "post open" will see adoption if there is a royalty owed for it.
  - dbcurtis 5y ago
    Imagine the business decision of selecting between a post-open licensed ware and BSD licensed similar functionality. In return for 1% of revenue and the hassle of an annual usage audit, you get what value in return, exactly? That is the key question. So as a purveyor of post-open software, you must have a business proposition that closes the deal. Not impossible, but different from the way most OSS projects operate today. Your skepticism is reasonable. To separate a customer from their money, you need to provide obvious value. It strikes me that once you take one post-open package into your stack, the incremental cost of the next N is zero. So maybe there is enough virality in that feature to drive adoption. One high-value post-open project could create a coat-tail effect.
Azrael3000 5y ago
I just skimmed the video so my TL;DR might not capture everything he said. Basically, he advocates a new license that he wants to develop that basically improves remuneration for open source developers. Use case: A "Post Open" software is used by a company, then this company has to pay a certain percentage (1 to 10%) of their revenue to the "Post Open" software. If it is using multiple "Post Open" packages this percentage is divided among them (according to usage). Software in this scheme will be allowed to be modified, redistributed etc. and it will also contain a public API that defines the boundaries of the program (so it's not about linking anymore). I hope that captures the key points.
- dbcurtis 5y ago
  Pretty good summary. Clarification: for-profit users pay a percentage of end user revenue. non-profits and individuals pay nothing. Automated auditing envisioned. This is a proposal, not nearly ready for roll-out. The concepts are interesting, but only a rough framework exists at this time. The ideas are worth discussing. I wish there was a succinct blog post or something about them rather than this painful video.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  There's a couple of other points of note: - Usage auditing for and reporting for Post-Open software is required alongside the payment. This is a huge reversal. Not having to do onerous license compliance monitoring was a big selling point touted by FOSS advocates for the past two decades, pointing to horror stories about audits demanded by the Business Software Alliance and huge payments for license violations. - It's called the "Post-Open" license for a reason: Bruce says FOSS has been defeated. He points out that corporations have both found ways to make money off of FOSS without contributing much and even hijacked the governance of FOSS for their own benefit. This is extremely startling to hear from someone so well known in open source.
- tytso 5y ago
  What's unclear is how is the revenue percentage split across all of the various contributors of a particular "post open" package. Suppose there are 10 "Post Open" packages; do all of the packages deserve to get an equal share of the 1% rev share? Maybe some "post open" packages are more technically complex than others? Maybe some "post open" packages are more key to the value-add than others. Even if there is only a single "post open" package which gets the full 1% of the rev share, what about one developer which contributes a whitespace or spelling fix, versus another developer which contributes a key part of the package? What if one developer contributes a huge number of lines of code, but it's for a feature which isn't actually used at all by a particular billion dollar use case of said "post open" package? The devil is really in the details.....

detaro 5y ago

Title doesnt match video title, intentional?

cpach 5y ago
The submitted title (now changed) was probably a summary of what 'zdw thought was the most interesting take-home from the video.

tzs 5y ago

It seems to be at about 7:51 that he starts talking about the problems he sees with current open source. Here's a link to that point in the video [1]. Around 12:47 is where he finishes that and concludes we cannot fix open source, and talks about "Post Open". Here's a link to that point in the video [2]. [1] https://youtu.be/XRl-it1-ruI?t=471 https://youtu.be/XRl-it1-ruI?t=471 [2] https://youtu.be/XRl-it1-ruI?t=767 https://youtu.be/XRl-it1-ruI?t=767

chromatin 5y ago

Well, the audio video quality is terrible, but the message -- in the second half, you have to power through a bunch of stuff about Crystal and Lucky -- is very interesting. He describes his vision for "post open source" license, which he is currently developing. His goals seem to be to to empower software developers to take back power from megacorps which have in his view subverted the nature of open source and turned it into a "resource extraction" scheme.

mfer 5y ago
I think there is a struggle between open source, having a viable business, and having a VC backed business. Folks aren't working that out well. VC backed businesses are different from viable businesses in that a viable business needs to be able to make money to pay expenses and operate while VC backed businesses need to make returns on investments for the VCs. For open-source projects that are the top level (e.g., PostreSQL) and being paid to work on it... it's often useful to have an enterprise market and support model. Side note, open source works better business model wise when things are more distributed. More centralized with megacorp clouds is harder for open source based businesses. For libraries that can be used by many projects, open source is a great way to go. I've done semver, vcs, and other libs this way. They aren't the business thing being sold but enablers of other things being build. Interfaces are great and we need more standard interfaces. They make is possible to have open source and proprietary solutions that work with the same stuff. Businesses can compete and work with more freedom to do so with open interfaces. Businesses trying to have an open source software SaaS that they run in public clouds are always going to be at a disadvantage. The public cloud provider can always do it cheaper and undercut the business. Businesses that try to go that route will end up having business issues. Physical products are another space all together. It's the thing (hardware + software) that make it work. Open source software is great there, too. I see it in the car I drive. Where we license things as open source should be coupled to our thought out business models. It's not an open source or post open source world. It's about the right tool for the job in front of us. We need more thought and talk on that.
JoshTriplett 5y ago
Another way of saying "post open source" is "not open source", or "proprietary". But, of course, those wouldn't get as much traction as trading on the good name of Open Source. We already have some copyleft licenses that prevent the kinds of proprietary SaaS usage that have prompted recent complaints. People and projects don't use those licenses; they use permissive licenses, and then get surprised when companies use their software under those permissive licenses. I've even seen people complain that if they use copyleft licenses, large companies won't touch their software. That's entirely the point! If you want companies to pay for an alternative license or an exception, you have to choose an Open Source license that they're not already willing to work with. Before we even consider giving up on the Schelling point that is Open Source, perhaps we should make better use of the full spectrum of Open Source licenses we already have.

Proven 5y ago

For me it's very simple - when I see GPL 3, I move on - even for personal uses. I can't imagine why I'd want anything to do with this license either. It's an unnecessary burden. Just stay away from it.

EvanAnderson 5y ago
Why is GPL 3 objectionable for personal uses?
- bachmeier 5y ago
  The completely serious answer is that some have turned this into a religion. GPL software is simply impure to them, so they won't touch it.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Which brings us to the question: would we be here if there had been no GPL at all?
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      No we wouldn't. The UNIX world and Windows would keep taking BSD code, assuming the court case would have ended the same way as it did, and that was it. The GPL haters tend to forget that GCC was pretty much ignored until Sun started the trend to split UNIX into user and developer editions, and without GNU there wouldn't be a userland for Linus to plug into Linux. Whatever, all UNIX clones that came after Linux (specially for IoT) are BSD/MIT based, so the long term roadmap is already quite obvious.
- Proven 5y ago
  Because I have to mind the license. Let's say today it's just for personal use. I modify it to work the way I want it, then 2 months later I decide to provide its output on my Web site. Now I have to publish the source code that includes modifications I've made. It's a burden in terms of both labor and time - I must perform this work against my will and for free because of GPL 3.0. I need to remove hard-coded parameters and arguments from scripts for security and privacy reasons, I need to create a repo and update it every time my code changes, etc. Why would I want to do that? Another example would be if I ever decided to use that code as part of my application and decide to share my application (even with friends, for free), now I either have to rewrite or replace the GPL 3.0 component, or else I have no choice but to force everyone downstream to use GPL 3.0. Some can't, some won't - to these folks, my app would be completely useless. If, on the other hand, I find a permissively licensed 3rd party program, library or script, I don't have to worry about it now or in the future, whether I run it on my own site, mix it with other code, or decide to share it with anyone.

xrayarx 5y ago

Already posted 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27961414

tomhoward 5y ago
It's not a dupe if the earlier submission had no front page time and discussion.

Doctor_Fegg 5y ago

Your regular reminder that there is already a permissive licence that effectively prevents use by megacorps: WTFPL. Google won’t touch software licensed with it and Intel have also refused it in the past. And yes, you can add a “no warranty” disclaimer in your readme too.

vintagedave 5y ago
> a permissive licence that effectively prevents use by megacorps _Why_ do mega corps like Google and Intel refuse to use it? There's nothing on Wikipedia [0], and the license is extremely short and clear. From your description I expected a license that explicitly denies permissions for certain purposes or types of companies. It's very much the opposite of that! :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
BrucePerens 5y ago
If it's not meant more as a joke than anything else, it should be.

throw7 5y ago

This kinda seems like it's creating a tweaked ASCAP or BMI regime for "postopen" developers. I'm not sure what to think of that at this moment.

qnsi 5y ago

Can someone share their opinion about Crystal? Is there a legitimate chance it will be used by startups in the future? The other part is interesting, but Crystal got my attention a lot

otoburb 5y ago
Ruby is still very popular, and Crystal's syntax is heavily inspired (i.e. very familiar) by Ruby. This is similar to Julia's approach of making the language syntactically familiar with MATLAB. If a bunch of startups continue to love Ruby's initial expressiveness and productivity (early code write & read cycles), then unless Ruby improves on similar dimensions then Crystal adoption may pick up. Of course, Crystal's adoption could be stopped if Ruby (and Rails) improves on the dimensions that Bruce Perens mentioned in his video; namely correctness, reliability and efficiency. Supposedly, Crystal is supposed to be faster, more reliable and just-as-efficient-to-write given the syntactic similarities that many developers love about Ruby.