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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem here is the risk of the JVM losing its suitability for large, scalable projects. Currently JVM on Linux is $0 in licenses. No matter what $N is, it's ∞% more than 0, and the added cost of scaling to X servers is X * N, not 0. Plus, of course, the ridiculous, soul sucking calls with a "consultant" who will try to sell you Oracle licenses and insists on being your pal and "how about I come out on Wednesday, these discussions are easier face-to-face" to actually procure the bloody licences - and then sends you an Excel sheet with 15 different term and payment options that you then have to spend an afternoon parsing. Better for a cash-strapped start up to go with something free instead.

This is exactly the reason Microsoft has a BizSpark™ programme, and Ruby doesn't.

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I read your reply twice and still can't see how it has anything to do with the subject and the patch being discussed. That's a pretty large leap from "we might want to have paid commercial features" to "JVM losing its suitability for large, scalable projects".

I'm not that worried about the whole thing. I mean, they could have included commercial features at any time, and probably do. This is just a switch.

The scenario I anticipate is the one where Oracle adds something generally useful to the JVM as a commercial feature. Off the top of my head, there's stuff in the memory management area such as a better GC or access to off-heap memory, or goodies for dynamic languages such as tail call optimization.

Suddenly, putting a bit of money in the JVM allows you to go faster. In the beginning, the community will be disciplined about it and make sure that libraries and applications that use these features degrades gracefully, so you can make use of them without getting the commercial JVM. But already here it starts smelling, there are now two target JVMs. Testing just doubled in complexity.

Soon, small, clever libraries that does immensely useful stuff with the new features appear - like what Google Collections did for generics - and pretty soon you're wilfully handicapping your developers by not using commercial JVM. When you already have a revenue-generating code base, throwing Oracle a little money is a no-brainer. There's no way they'd make licensing so expensive that it wouldn't get a CTO fired NOT to buy it. But now they've introduced the drag at the start-up level which I'd voice concern over in my previous post. This is especially sad at a time when the JVM and even Java seems to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance.

How exactly does an open source programming language compare to a cloud computing program from Microsoft? I don't really see the link, at all.

Or are you equivocating Ruby with Rails running in a cloud platform? Your last sentence doesn't really parse well.

BizSpark is a program that gives free Microsoft software to startups and small businesses for three years. From my understanding, it has nothing to do with cloud platforms.

BizSpark members get a bunch of free Azure resources as part of the package, but I would guess that isn't really a big part of the selling point for most who actually use the program.

BizSpark is a program to give software free to cash-strapped developers. He's saying that being free gives you a huge boost from grassroots support. Ruby doesn't need to do anything special to get this support because it is already free. The Microsoft stack is commercial, though, so they need to have a whole specialized program just to almost level the playing field.

Strikes me more as an equivalent to "first hits free" where the hidden cost is as you scale you'll just end up paying more.

But that makes more sense thanks, I don't normally deal with Microsoft products in that fashion.

BizSpark isn't a cloud platform. It's a program by Microsoft that gives free licenses to startups. They also have a similar program for students called something like DreamSpark. It's just like a drug dealer saying "the first hit's free" :)

Open source projects like Ruby naturally don't need anything like this; the whole open source model is more open and accessible for everyone than even Microsoft's free offerings.

The licensing on a MS software stack is nominally crazy-expensive, BizSpark provides lower-cost (or free) licenses for Windows, SQL Server, etc. to smaller companies to make it possible for startups to use MS.

Ruby doesn't need such a program because the cost of licensing Ruby for a company that only has 2 servers and the cost of licensing Ruby on a fleet of 10,000 servers is still $0. The same is true for Java, for now...

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