For sale: Rails, slightly used. $25,000 | Hacker News Reader

For sale: Rails, slightly used. $25,000

hasmanyreasons.com

19 pointsgisikw8 comments

Hold up.

1) If you don't agree, don't contribute (time or money). You're doing OSS wrong.

2) Obviously Yehuda has given a lot to Rails and other OSS communities. He recognizes a problem (regardless of its origin) that he wants to fix. Posts like this will drive people like him away. I know my life is easier because of the work Yehuda has done. If you don't like it, go back to Rails 2.X, or help fix it yourself.

3) Thinking back to the Rails 2 days, things weren't dramatically better for dependencies and getting Rails setup. This project would be applicable then.

4) Posts like this will only drive away the contributions of a smart, giving person. Lots of people make a lot of money off the work the Rails Core Team has done, don't label one of them a thief because they need financial help to focus their improvements on a specific pain point.

A significant amount of time was spent letting advancement stagnate so we could have enterprise features we have now...the features Yehuda wants to be paid to fix.

This project says "Hey, I have helped make Rails a pain in the ass to use unless you know Rails really well. Instead of fixing this at the core level you can pay me to make something else to fix this!"

What's next? A program to make bundler work better? I expect more from a project like rails. It is like an Xbox game with zero day paid DLC. "Here is rails. Now contribute money so I can make it work as advertised!"

The author, with this article, is not "doing" OSS. He's "doing" persuasive writing. That he not contribute to the project is a given, since he doesn't agree with it. Having and expressing an opinion about whether or not others should contribute is well within his purview. If you're not swayed -- remain unswayed. Others may be.

I suspect that this project will end up in the same place as Locomotive, for the same reasons. It's a very platform-specific way to manage a thing that should be largely platform-agnostic. Now, if someone were to leverage homebrew and write a recipe for one-stop installation of Rails with sensible choices for its dependencies, that would be cool.

I think there has been a huge shift toward OS X since the days of Locomotive. This turn-key solution may gain more traction in today's dev ecosystem. (Though, I'm still not behind it.)

I think you're overreacting. Don't contribute to the project if you aren't interested.

Personally, I don't think this is needed, but I can see why people are interested in it.

I think the article had a good point when it mentioned that the issues that are trying to be resolved stem from projects that were led by the guy trying to raise the funds.

Only the point is BS.

It's not like he purposefully introduced some "painful_installation" feature, and is now asking money to make it go away.

It's not even like he unintentionally introduced some "painful_installation" feature, and is now asking money to make it go away.

What he did was what every OSS contributor does. He created some tools, added some fixes to Rails, changed some stuff, proposed some future roadmap, etc. One among MANY. People used his tools and changes and adopted them because they made their lives easier.

That doesn't mean that those changes (e.g the Bundler, a way to gather requirements) can or should also solve the general problem of easy installation of a whole and complete Rails system.

And that's what he asks money to create: an easy installer for the whole system.

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