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I'm always disappointed when an open source-ish tool has to market itself. Unicorn didn't market itself. Its users marketed Unicorn because it worked/works so w

I'm always disappointed when an open source-ish tool has to market itself. Unicorn didn't market itself. Its users marketed Unicorn because it worked/works so well. I also don't think the comparisons Raptor is doing are fair. You're comparing an application server with a cache against just application servers. Also, I would expect Raptor's memory usage to be higher once that cache starts to fill up, or maybe you've created a super small cache just for "Hello World" apps. People aren't avoiding Passenger because "it's too easy to use", a lot of people avoid Passenger because you're a weird company. Application servers are very important, perhaps too important to be tied to a commercial entity. I applaud you on the work (code-wise) you've put into this and I hope the entire Ruby community as a whole benefits from it, like you claim we have with older versions of Passenger (which kinda seems like revisionist history to me, but oh well).

steveklabnik 12y ago
> Unicorn didn't market itself. You don't remember "I love Unicorn because it's UNIX?" http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix as well as GitHub's postings about using Unicorn? I admit this particular campaign makes me a bit... unhappy. But every open source project does marketing, explicit or implicit.
- rubiquity 12y ago
  Was Ryan Tomayko involved in Unicorn? My point was that it would be different if Eric Wong wrote a post like that. Ryan Tomayko taking the time to write that post is exactly my point: good tools spread by having users that love them.
  - whistlerbrk 12y ago
    I think that's why he mentioned "implicit" marketing. In this day we're often fond of saying "the best products market themselves" but that usually means through evangelism via it's users.
xinuc 12y ago
> Application servers are very important, perhaps too important to be tied to a commercial entity. I think exactly the opposite. I think apps servers are too important to be left without financial support. Remember when Zed Shaw abandoned his great work on mongrel? I don't think he'd do the same if he had thousands of paying users, and maybe we'd still use (maintained and improved) mongrel today.
chloerei 12y ago
Passenger's users(like me) not know much about app server's technology details, I want to focus on bussiness. I can write article say "Passenger is good, it works well", but can not write articles like "Unicorn is Unix". So Passenger's creator need to write article themselves.

steveklabnik 12y ago

> Unicorn didn't market itself. You don't remember "I love Unicorn because it's UNIX?" http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix as well as GitHub's postings about using Unicorn? I admit this particular campaign makes me a bit... unhappy. But every open source project does marketing, explicit or implicit.

rubiquity 12y ago
Was Ryan Tomayko involved in Unicorn? My point was that it would be different if Eric Wong wrote a post like that. Ryan Tomayko taking the time to write that post is exactly my point: good tools spread by having users that love them.
- whistlerbrk 12y ago
  I think that's why he mentioned "implicit" marketing. In this day we're often fond of saying "the best products market themselves" but that usually means through evangelism via it's users.

xinuc 12y ago

> Application servers are very important, perhaps too important to be tied to a commercial entity. I think exactly the opposite. I think apps servers are too important to be left without financial support. Remember when Zed Shaw abandoned his great work on mongrel? I don't think he'd do the same if he had thousands of paying users, and maybe we'd still use (maintained and improved) mongrel today.

chloerei 12y ago

Passenger's users(like me) not know much about app server's technology details, I want to focus on bussiness. I can write article say "Passenger is good, it works well", but can not write articles like "Unicorn is Unix". So Passenger's creator need to write article themselves.