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Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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 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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