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Comment by venus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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".

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