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I seem to have heard the same kind of answer from the Rails community before: "do it yourself if you really care". I don't blame DHH for it, but I think it is i
by pius 19y ago
I seem to have heard the same kind of answer from the Rails community before: "do it yourself if you really care". I don't blame DHH for it, but I think it is interesting to note the difference to the major Java frameworks I know, like Spring. I think they care a lot more about their community and the popularity of their framework.
I think this is merely the difference between a framework that is fundamentally open source and a framework that is fundamentally vendor-supported (e.g. SpringSource writing and supporting Spring). From my perspective, the Rails Core team cares quite a bit about their community, as their community is themselves. Any developer who has a patch or plugin is free to make it available. That's the beauty of open source.
- Tichy 19y agoI don't really understand the difference, as Spring is open source as well? However, I guess SpringSource makes money from consulting, so it is in their interest to have as many people as possible adapt Spring?
- pius 19y agoI'm not hugely familiar with Spring, but the impression I get is that it's not really open source. SpringSource, as a commercial entity, essentially controls the authoring of the framework and has a financial interest in adding features that will drive the widest user adoption possible. If this is wrong, please feel free to correct me.
- Tichy 19y agoAs far as I know, it is completely open source - not even semi open source like MySQL, where they have a commercial and a public license, or like jBoss, where you would have to pay for proper documentation. I think 37signals controls the source of Rails, so again, where is the difference? I just checked, Spring has the Apache 2.0 license, which is very liberal I think (for example, not as restrictive as the GPL with it'S virality). Of course the interests of SpringSource and 37signals are probably very different, although I think Rails is good publicity for 37signals (if not the only publicity). If SpringSource lives on consulting, of course the question is allowed if the features they add are tailored towards making consulting necessary (as I think is a bit the case with the J2EE specification). My impression so far has not been like that, though.
- pius 19y ago37signals actually does not control Rails. There's no vendor behind it that stands to (directly) make money if more people adopt it. One thing to remember about Rails was the context in which it was conceived. Rails was not designed as a framework; rather, it was extracted from a real project as a useful skeleton. It is "opinionated software" conceived and publicized as a reaction to the bloated frameworks in the Java world. Edge cases are pushed out into plugins, features generally have to be rejected several times before they make it into core, etc.
- Tichy 19y agoOf course they control Rails. Or are you telling me that I could this very minute submit some patch to Rails and announce that Rails 3.0 is out? I don't think so. I don't deny that they might be different in orientation. But which one is a better bet, the one that tries to anticipate all your needs and make you happy (Spring), or the one that only cares for the needs of it's developers? Not saying either way - bloat might be a problem for some, but Spring is very modular, you can only use parts if you want to. Spring earns more money if more people adapt it, so they try to make it as good as possible. What is the incentive for Rails, I don't know? Economically, their incentive would have to be to get their competition in trouble, to their own benefit? Perhaps they don't even use Rails internally ;-) Actually Spring also grew out of frustration and personal need, it was a result of Rod Johnson's experiences as consultant, if I remember correctly.