Hacker News Reader

Passenger is open source and has an enterprise tier. Though written in C++ they very much serve the Ruby world.

Nonetheless, I agree with your point that this model may not be suitable for every business.

To be fair, there are probably any number of businesses failing to make proprietary products with Ruby and Rails at any given time.

But yeah, open source makes things a bit trickier, in my opinion.

Maybe it's rare in the Ruby world, but you don't have to look very far for other examples. It's basically the model Basho use for Riak, for instance.

Red Hat has a rather large number of GPL-licensed Ruby projects, does that count for you?

Travis-CI has a huge open source offering and started out of that.

Gitlab and Gitorious are open source and for profit as well.

I agree with all your points but I think he's trying to say, "... and you can ,too."