Interesting. As an EY customer, this isn't something I like to hear.
Was Rubinius a sort of R&D department at EY?
Was Rubinius a sort of R&D department at EY?
These layoffs are not as bad a news for a customer. It's just that as a hacker or an open source adopter, it is a bit of a blow. It is like someone taking back half the lottery money you initially won. (Hell, it was still a lottery only.)
There are very few companies (especially startups) who go so far as Engine Yard does/did in actually hiring people and supporting an Open Source Project to this extent. And they still haven't completely pulled the plug off it yet. I sincerely hope Rubinius does become a stable implementation of Ruby, and all the hard work pays off well for the contributors.
Disclaimer: I don't work at Engine Yard, and am thousands of miles away from the place of action.
I was the one that asked Ezra to keep an eye on Evan and Rubinius after RubyConf 2006. We really felt that the community would benefit from an industrial strength Ruby runtime, and still feel that way today.
We hired Evan more than 6 months before we received venture funding.
When we received our series A funding, we hired the best team we could get our hands on and hoped to push Rubinius through to 1.0, which we define as no apologies MRI parity, as quickly as possible.
Things are good here at Engine Yard. We have a growing customer base, and very interesting new products in the pipeline. As with all other business in these times, sharpening the budget just makes very good sense.
We did what we felt we must do to make certain we could continue funding Rubinius through to completion.