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Comment by coherentpony | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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 ?

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