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Comment by mattetti | Hacker News Reader

And here is how MacRuby developers were lied to and the RubyMotion project made the choice to not contribute back but instead to focus on keeping innovation proprietary.

https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2012-Ap...

It's quite a sad day to think that Apple invested on MacRuby and kept it open source... and RubyMotion chose another route even for OS X dev.

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[Disclaimer: MacRuby core member here.]

I agree, it’s too bad that people can’t just work for free as much as they would like on the stuff they love.

Now it is true that Laurent himself has not touched the repo since that email you linked to, but you know just as well as me that Watson has been doing maintenance work on MacRuby while on the payroll of RubyMotion (HipByte). His latest commit was 15 days ago and here’s a generalised diff of all the work done since the email: https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/compare/94c90b351c18ce1f5....

This is what people with limited time resources do, they delegate.

To conclude, when you’re out to paint someone black, you really should be more specific. As it stands, there are no lies in that email, which means that you are the one that is not telling the truth. I’m not sure why you want to spread FUD, but it’s quite obvious and really does not make you look professional.

PS: Whatever Apple chose or chooses to do has absolutely no relevancy to this at all. The moment they released it as Open-Source, they effectively said that people can do what they want as long as they follow the license.

Well put.

Alloy my point was not about maintenance but the fact that MacRuby relies on the ObjC GC which is now deprecated. In this email thread Laurent acknowledge the need to switch to static compilation and that he has a working branch he will soon merge.

This is exactly what RubyMotion just released and I'm saddened that it was not contributed back as promised.

It's as simple as that.

I've been losing respect for HipByte. Laurent is making tough calls, I'll bide my time.

Well, spoking of broken promises and people abandoning things, didn't you write a book on MacRuby and a couple of articles touting it, and then abandoned the project for greener pastures (Ruby, Go and such)?

What about the folks that bought into the book and MacRuby, thinking that it was a viable project, and then see you, one of the (few) main contributors abandon it -- and long before today's release of RubyMotion.

I'm saddended my pizza shop does not hand out free pies, too.

Shell out the $200 for the hard work they put into it and get over your entitlement complex.

"But you PROMISED!"

Oh yes, what a horrid selfish man, trying to feed his family and make a business for himself. Not like generous, giving, open source-loving Apple!

Give me a break. The guy's made something amazing. Good on him for charging for it, making a success of it, so much so that we now have a version 2.0. This would never have come from some lousy half-hearted Apple mailing list.

I am happy to pay for this product, and I do not blame him for keeping it proprietary. I just don't see what your point is. It seems like you just want something for nothing and are dressing that up in some unlikely open-source clothes.

You have completely missed the point.

Charging for software is not a crime. The point is that he lied to the open source community about his intentions.

It has been over a year since that post. It is not at all implausible that the post accurately described his intentions at the time he wrote it.

Your accusation that he deliberately lied, rather than simply changed his mind, has no foundation whatsoever.

I can vouch for this. Laurent and I heavily discussed RubyMotion in its early days. His idea was to create a mobile solution (ergo Motion in the name) and had no intention whatsoever to include Mac OS X development at the time. It turns out however that the market wanted a unified toolchain. Many customers asked for it. And Laurent, like any good business person would, listened to the needs of his customers.

Antonio, but nothing prevented him to contribute back to MacRuby (OS X) the required changes to get rid of the GC and therefore to not rely on deprecated technology.

Who says that that option is off the table for good; many companies release open source software after the initial proprietary release.

Tough shit. He's trying to support himself and his employees. Likewise, backporting their work to a even slightly different code base would require time they frankly don't have. Unless you have a time travel device you can give him, don't demand time he doesn't have.

Laurent frankly is underpricing his wonderful tools, and has to support himself and all those folks he's hired.

Time is finite, and no human can do all the things they'd like to do.

Modifying RubyMotion to have the right hooks for the OS X apis etc is likely much simpler than fixing up MacRuby architecturally.

Point being, people have finite time, they can't do all the things they want to. Either be nice or give him a time turning / time travel device

Except, he didn’t lie. He spent money to have Watson also do maintenance work on MacRuby.

Where is the GC switch he mentioned tho ?

I just thought I would point out that the guy you're replying to is actually one of the top contributors to MacRuby.

Yes, and Shizuo Fujita and Laurent are THE top contributors. Both HipByte employees. Matt's last commit was two years ago:

f6908b2 - 2011-04-28 21:50:28 -0700 fixed a stupid bug in the Xcode4 template (Matt Aimonetti)

I know, I know. I don't care who's right or wrong here, colinta. It's only that I thought "hey, maybe venus doesn't know that mattetti is one of the guys that worked on MacRuby, I'll point that out".

I find that it's a happy day, not a sad day (even if I like open-source).

Why? Because now some of my customers are going to seriously think about using Ruby for Mac OS X apps, because they know someone is making profit while supporting this, so they feel they can rely on this.

I much prefer this to the fate of IronRuby (or to some extent, MacRuby).

Remember what you wrote one year ago [1] ?

    Using RubyMotion for a professional product represents
    a significant business risk, which is exactly the same
    as using proprietary technology from any vendor.

It turns out the opposite is coming to reality :p

[1] http://merbist.com/2012/05/04/macruby-on-ios-rubymotion-revi...

As someone who wrote a number of MacRuby apps, I find the support for OSX wonderful.

MacRuby is slow and clunky. Fact. This is a big improvement performance wise.

Do I mind paying for that improvement? Hell no. MacRuby development has pretty much halted once it lost Apple Support. I don't mind paying for something that will be maintained and improved upon.

Apple invested in MacRuby? What a joke! This project was almost singlehandedly held by one person. I know for a fact that Apple doesn't give a fuck about MacRuby, don't fool yourself about that.

Who ask for this misinformed opinion?

>Apple invested in MacRuby? What a joke!

Yes, it did. Back in the day, MacRuby started by Apple employees and initial development was paid by Apple.

>This project was almost singlehandedly held by one person.

Which is beside the point.

>I know for a fact that Apple doesn't give a fuck about MacRuby

You don't say! That has been the case several years now, since Apple stopped supporting the project. Everybody in the MacRuby community knows this.

>don't fool yourself about that.

Thank you, Captain Informed.

If you don't like RubyMotion, then don't buy a license. Plain as that! Thanks Laurent, Shizuo, and the FANTASTIC RubyMotion community!

I wouldn't take this personally, it is just a smart business decision. It makes sense that once you buy a RubyMotion license to be able to use the same toolchain on OS X.

Also, I wouldn't mind paying for RubyMotion as long as I'm assured the project will go forward.

Unfortunately MacRuby lost momentum when Apple decided to not support the project anymore.

Lied? or changed his mind?

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