Re: Ruby Fishy Edition
Magnus Holm blogged about Ruby Enterprise Edition. He, along with some other people on RubyFlow, criticized our workflow. I felt obligated to reply. Unfortunately his blog doesn’t allow comments.
We had already sent this patch to the Ruby core mailing list. Magnus, search the mailing list archives and this blog’s archives if you don’t believe me. We’re providing Ruby Enterprise Edition because upstream is unclear about what they intent to do with the patch. But in the mean time, there exists clear demand for the functionality provided by this patch, and so we’ve chosen to temporarily maintain our own fork.
The eventual fate of Ruby Enterprise Edition is, and has been since the beginning, to be merged back upstream. This is explained on the Ruby Enterprise Edition website, which is currently being worked on. This is also why we have chosen to use git as version control system: so that any changes we make can be relatively easily merged back. This all has been planned since the very beginning.
The reason why we pulled it out temporarily is because we felt that there are improvements to be made. We don’t want people to use a half-baked product, because first experiences are very important.
We are a commercial company, and we’ve never made this a secret. We could have easily chosen not to write/publish any of this at all. And yet we have, and we’re even providing all this to you for free. I’m not sure what your point is. Regarding any kinds of profit that we MIGHT generate, should we apologize for trying to put bread on the table? That kind of defeats the point of being a company right?
Magnus said:
Unfornately, I immediately think of a company which does what ever they can to promote their products. As a programmer, I don’t like promoting. I like code. Hard facts that I can verify. That’s the reason not everybody is satisfied with the demo of MagLev.
Magnus, the code is available, along with promotion. What is the problem? Should we not do any promotion at all?
Finally, Magnus also said:
The strange thing is that Phusion actually produce awesome stuff. Passenger is really neat and simple; Ruby Enterprise Edition looks like a great patch. And I’m pretty sure that they will come up with even more genius products.
Still, I think it’s a little fishy…
So what is the actual complaint?
Nown said,
June 5, 2008 @ 12:43 pm
In order to first clarify my position: I use and *love* modrails.
As it has been said, the problem is that it appears (and this is the case since the beginning) that you are *not*, respecting the usual rules in the OpenSource world.
First, you work on your own, making a lot of promotion. Well, that’s a choice. But that’s certainly now how it works in the community! I mean the result is extremely impressive, but it appears that you are doing more to be some kind of heroes than you are doing for the community.
So here are the points that disturb me. But first I want to make it clear that you are free to run and name your projects anything you want! It’s just that I (and I don’t think I am the only one) feel this could be made better:
- The name: “Ruby Enterprise Edition”. It sounds so like Microsoft! Why not call it “Ruby XP” while we are at it? Come on! Nothing makes it “Entreprise”! Yes, Enterprises needs to spare memory, but not more than anyone else! That’s just a title to make it sound professionnal, to have something for SALE.
- You keep working on your own, shadowing parts of the development. Come on! I know you want to make big events for every new release. What about contacting Universal to release FULL-HD teasers with that strong, virile-sounding voice saying: “Be prepared to face the revolution of the Ruby World. Nothing will be impossible anymore… Coming this summer… By the writers of modrails… ” Don’t say you *have* to behave this way because you *have* to make money, and you are a business company, etc. A lot of big companies invest in free software without having to make so much fuzz about everything.
- It has been a few week since the first version was made avaliable. And you are already advertising on version, not 0.2, not 1.1, but 2.0! Come on! What version is Linux kernel now? Once more, it’s great to make big events and version number about everything! But that’s not how we do it here! If you guys want to be credible in the opensource community, you’ve better start behaving now! Everybody will get tired of it real soon!
- You never release anything in time. Look at modrails a few weeks ago! I think it was 2 weeks late, after making so much fuzz. And Ruby Enterprise Edition was to be released by the same time, or so. Then you built the website just to make fun of other deployment techniques, and nothing. And after your talk, you were supposed to publish REE, but… oh wait, we have no Internet here! So pick your side! Either you choose the Big Profit Company side, and get big countdowns running on your website, but hold your promises, or pick the open source side, and nobody will ever tell you’re late, as long as the current development version is avaliable!
So, no matter how I look at it, the only thing I see is that you behave so much like a profit company (which you are, that’s not a problem), that I don’t think it will be a year before you release a closed-source “pro” version, having all the new exciting features, while the good old open source version is little by little stripped off.
So what? Well, you’re doing an absolutely amazing job. But it would be SO MUCH BETTER if you just added a little MODESTY in it! And you would only gain credibility, which would be good for you! So, get modest, stop shadowing your development, and you will start gaining respect from the community. So now, just remember your clients *are* people from the open source community.
Eloy Duran said,
June 5, 2008 @ 1:58 pm
Wow, the amount of time people seem to have on their hands to write articles, basically explaining how they haven’t *actually* took the time to read all the information available but still feel the urge to preach, never seizes to amaze me….
And what’s up with this “you are *not*, respecting the usual rules in the OpenSource world”.
I must have missed the headlines, but is the motto nowadays: “Free as in no-humor.”??
Bottom line, it is free, it is great and they did everything to get it merged back in from the start.
(I remember the emails on the ML from Hongli asking about updates from Matz et all on the patches.)
And what’s more, they took the time to create all this fun-colourish-marketing-like-stuff. I for one respect AND enjoy that a lot!
So to the Phusion guys: I hope you keep on doing the stuff you guys do, which is delivering great code to the OSS community and absolutely don’t let these types feel you like you’re doing something wrong with getting acknowledged for your work thus leading to income.
Eloy
Nown said,
June 5, 2008 @ 2:07 pm
What never seizes to amaze me is how people don’t understand that criticizing is actually meant to help and not to destroy.
Of course, you can take every point I made, prove it wrong if you wish. Then, I could come back with another bunch of examples and arguments proving you wrong. But I just won’t.
Or, you could just think: “Well, I think this guy is wrong. But, the fact that at least he and Magnus appear to dislike Phusion’s ways might mean that there is something that could be improved”.
That’s your call!
Brian Smith said,
June 5, 2008 @ 3:38 pm
Phusion is doing a great job and there’s no reason for you to be defensive about anything. I would have paid money for Passenger 2.0 or something like it. I would probably have paid money for Ruby EE if I was a ruby developer.
Elam said,
June 5, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
Magnus’ point is just what he said; the whole thing just seems fishy, and sadly, me and most of my ruby cohorts share the same sentiment. It’s one of those things where you might not even know exactly why you feel weird, but something about it just doesn’t sit right. Sure mod_rails is amazing, but an amazing product isn’t everything (to me at least).
It is hard for me to understand why after so much criticism about the name Ruby Enterprise Edition you don’t change the name. What is so hard about it? Put forth some effort to show the community you care what they think.
You can ignore and disregard blog posts like the one Magnus wrote, but it won’t change the way they being perceived by the Ruby/Rails community.
Taelor said,
June 5, 2008 @ 4:40 pm
Dudes, just keep on keeping on. You guys have been doing some great work. You have really helped alot of people, not to mention the whole ruby/rails/merb/etc ecosystem as a whole with passenger. You have contributed more to the community than I could ever image my noobish self doing.
If you want to try and get paid for some stuff, go for it. Thats whats great about the free market.
Ivan V. said,
June 5, 2008 @ 5:26 pm
I think the fact that there are both people who do and do not like Phusion speaks for itself.
I *personally* don’t understand why some people think companies owe you something when you get stuff (awesome stuff for that matter) for free, specially when there’s no fine print.
I guess it’s a cultural matter.
Geoffrey Grosenbach said,
June 5, 2008 @ 5:50 pm
The real problem here is that Ninh has secretly licensed the Reality Distortion Field from Steve Jobs.
I met Ninh in person last week and immediately felt an intense desire to install Passenger, buy a Louis Vuitton neck scarf, and wear big sunglasses. I fear that his current trip to the United States was directly motivated by a desire to spread this mania to as many people as possible.
Hongli said,
June 5, 2008 @ 7:00 pm
Nown:
So, in summary, these are your criticisms:
1. You said that our motive for creating Passenger/Ruby Enterprise Edition is not “to benefit the entire community”, but more to be “heroes”.
2. You think the name “Ruby Enterprise Edition” sounds too “enterprisey”.
3. Shadowing parts of the development.
4. Large version number jumps.
5. Releases are late.
6. You fear that we’ll eventually make stuff closed source.
Re: point 1 and 3: We are not a charity. It’s nice if we benefit the community, but that doesn’t pay our electric bills! The pure fact is that everything we’ve released so far is open source. Why should it matter to anybody what our motives are? Everybody’s still reaping the fruits from our work.
What do you think the motives of RedHat are? They’re not contributing to Linux and GNU because they’re nice people, but to support their own business.
As for “heroes”: a lot of people have been asking (or even condemning) Passenger for not supporting Rack. However, the Passenger sources have been out there for several weeks, and is even fully documented. Yet nobody bothered to implement Rack support! We’ve kept careful watch of people who were trying to do this, prior to taking the initiative for implementing Rack. Unfortunately, it seemed as if nobody was attempting this so we implemented it instead. If anything, we would’ve loved for some other “heroes” to have implemented this for us instead! We believe that this is a logistical problem as well as a demand problem. A logistical and demand problem in the sense that people who are capable of implementing this, aren’t interested in implementing this. In particular, it seems that C++ contributers are in general, quite rare.
Rails has been out there for several years. Yet nobody prior to Passenger had bothered tackling the deployment problem. We tried, and we released our work under a totally open source license. We’ve spent a significant amount of time and money into this for the benefit of the community. Sure, we gain momentum, but that was the main point to begin with :-).
Another myth is that open source is free (as in beer). It is not free free: some party to spend resources into it. The time we invested in Passenger is certainly not free.
Re: point 2: There are people who cannot see past the name. Some people out there who might accept Ruby Enterprise Edition because “Enterprise” is in the name (e.g. some management people), just like you reject it because “Enterprise” is in the name. From this, it should become apparent that programmers potentially have a better shot of introducing Ruby into their environments, while knowing that it is able to live up to its name to a certain extent. It’s a win-win situation here, or so we believe. For one thing though, it seems that the name has caused a lot of commotion, and if we were to involve Kathy Sierra’s “zone of mediocrity” theory, then we’re perfectly fine with that actually: “if you haven’t offended at least one person, you’re doing something wrong”.
So from a marketing standpoint, we believe the name is justified.
From a technical point of view, we also believe that the name is justified. It is a fact that Ruby Enterprise Edition yields significantly higher performance and significantly reduces memory usage. Feel free to benchmark it yourself.
Bottom line, it’s got you people talking about our products right? So keep it up, I’d say.
Re: point 4: First of all, large version jumps are unusual? I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Most Linux distributions have large version number jumps in a short amount of time. Slackware went from version 4 to 7.
Secondly, for every person that’s complaining about version jumps being too large, I can find just as many people complaining about version jumps in open source projects being too small. Just search Slashdot for comments on complaints about 0.x version numbers, of the eternal complaints about Enlightenment being stuck in 0.17.x.
Also, what are we talking about here? It’s just a number. But even though it’s a number, it is not unimportant. There are people out there who refuse to use a product, based on its version number, regardless of any technical merits. Rails is a good example this, they begin at 2.0.1 and not 2.0.0.
Re: point 5: Yes, we regret that releases are late. But our team is quite small and we’re overwhelmed with work. Right now I’m trying this comment from a hotel in Portland (not exactly a good place to do development), and we’re just preparing to head back to the Netherlands. Sorry, but we’re human. We can’t work faster.
I’m not sure what you’re expecting from us. But we are simply not going to rush releases. We want quality releases that are stable, even if it means delaying things a little. Even if releases are late, they’re not significantly late. There are so many people who rush releases, and quality suffers as a result. Sorry, we are not one of them, and we will not be one of them.
And these products are free and completely open source. So people, what are we talking about? Passenger 2.0 might not have been released, but we pushed the sources to github and it’s out there for everyone to grab.
Re: point 6: In case you haven’t noticed, Passenger is released under the GPL version 2 (as opposed to BSD/MIT-like), exactly to prevent it from ever being made closed source. The choice of GPLv2 was explicit.
“Sale”? What sale? Ruby Enterprise Edition is completely open source. We have not made this a secret. To everybody at RailsConf who asked whether Ruby Enterprise Edition is closed source, and we answered “no” to all those people. Furthermore, Ruby is dual licensed, and one of the licenses is GPL. We simply would not be allowed to make enhancements closed source.
So I’m not sure how you ever got the idea that we’re going to close things. Every fact indicates that we don’t, and can’t.
Just to get a grasp of where you’re at: how many patches have you contributed? It’s always easier to complain about things than to contribute. We have contributed to the community in terms of real work. What about you?
Lourens Naude said,
June 5, 2008 @ 7:00 pm
No different than what sent Zed over the top - good to great to greatness generally incurs a lot of negativity.
No different than Twitter’s current situation - if you product’s being shot down, it’s important enough to p*ss people off.
Keep the passion and please keep doing what you’re doing.
Nown said,
June 5, 2008 @ 7:31 pm
Ok. You’ve made your point, and that’s your choice! I just thought these points were worth mentionning. I am glad to hear that you have no intention of close-sourcing anything!
There is one thing that comes out of pretty much every comment on this topic: “You can’t criticize people doing great work, and you wouldn’t even do any better”.
Let me take an example. You might have heard of Zidane, the best football player of all time for some? Well… I really suck at football. And he’s a semi-god at it! Does it prevent me from saying “He shouldn’t have knocked off the italian guy on his last game”? What I mean here is that you don’t have to be better than the guys you’re criticizing! Imagine how the World would be stuck!
So: YES, phusion is doing a GREAT job, which I admire! And NO I couldn’t even do 10% of what you did. And NO you don’t owe me anything. And YES you gave me a lot, because I’ve got a few servers running Passenger. And YES it’s your company and you can do anything you want with it. And NO, I don’t believe in communism, and I strongly encourage you to make money out of such good products!
BUT: that doesn’t prevent me from saying what I feel like would improve your image!
Now, you’re free to take it or leave it, and I see no point in trying to argue (which I already did too much).
Hongli said,
June 5, 2008 @ 7:53 pm
@Nown:
Just to make one thing clear, we REALLY appreciate your comments. This is reflected in the fact that we don’t disable comments or censor your comments. The reason why we’ve asked you these questions, is just to point out that it’s easy to coin something that SOUNDS reasonable, but in reality (unfortunately) isn’t: our experience with both the ‘enterprise’ and ‘the open source’ community, is that things that work for the open source community don’t necessarily work well for the enterprise and vice versa. For instance, release often, release fast is something that should be avoided under certain circumstances where resources are scarce and first impressions are important: this was the case with Passenger when it was on its way to hit the 1.0 mark, yet you wanted us to prematurely release it and we couldn’t blame you since we wanted it out as soon as possible as well. But the latter should be done in a responsible way.
In short, we could have a lengthy discussion about this, where we’d bring up some arguments, and where you’d try to retort them, and where this cycle repeats OR we could work on improving on open source products in such a way that they’re easily adopted by enterprises as well. Bottom line, thank you for your comment and concerns as it goes to show that we’re not the only ones who care about this company and its products.
P.S. @Geoffrey Likewise, you’re “suited up/inquisitive appearance” made me feel quite insecure about my enterpriseyness
Have you ever considered becoming a superhero? I mean, we have superman, batman, but I think the world would be better off with “businessman” instead. However, as uncle Ben told Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility! Looking forward to meeting you again soon. -Ninh
Keviniano said,
June 5, 2008 @ 7:59 pm
Hi Hongli, et al–
It sounds to me like most of this criticism (though I don’t think it’s intended as criticism so much as constructive feedback) is about marketing. Most programmers (myself included) are very suspicious of anything we perceive as glitzy marketing, because we associate it with poorly made products that compensate for their lack of substance with a shiny appearance. What I hear some people saying here is, “here’s the most effective way to promote your product to *me* and here’s the way *I* would like to have you in the community.” Once you get that information, then it’s up to you to determine if that perspective is representative of who you want to be reaching out to. If it is, altering your marketing style and community involvement may be in your interest. If it’s not, then you can probably safely ignore it.
Either way, the best immediate response is probably something like, “thanks for your feedback. We’ll take it into account as we move forward.” It may be useful to correct misinformation, if there is any, but arguing with people’s subjective perceptions of your marketing style, version numbers, etc. probably won’t get you anywhere. It’ll just sap you of energy that you’d probably much rather direct towards making awesome software (which you do, by the way!).
So, thanks for an awesome and deeply needed product, and have fun learning from all the challenges that come with success!
Hongli said,
June 5, 2008 @ 8:11 pm
@Keviniano:
Thank you for your feedback. We’ll take it into account as we move forward.
All kidding aside, we do take all feedback into consideration, i.e. the reason why we’re having this conversation here. Unfortunately, it’s hard for us to explain our methodology on certain things, as they’re best understood if you’ve walked the path. We just wanted to point this out, i.e. nothing we’ve done is without substantial reason. Needless to say, we love to elaborate on this and we’re always for more than happy to receive input as it often sheds a new light on the matter. So keep it up, that’s all we’re saying
Magnus Holm said,
June 5, 2008 @ 9:41 pm
I agree with both Nown and Keviniano, and the key point is your marketing. I think we’ve already said most of it, so I just quote the essence of my rant:
- “Most programmers (myself included) are very suspicious of anything we perceive as glitzy marketing, because we associate it with poorly made products that compensate for their lack of substance with a shiny appearance.”
- “A lot of big companies invest in free software without having to make so much fuzz about everything.”
- “The whole thing just seems fishy, and sadly, me and most of my ruby cohorts share the same sentiment. It’s one of those things where you might not even know exactly why you feel weird, but something about it just doesn’t sit right.”
- “Well, you’re doing an absolutely amazing job.”
About the late releases: We know that you’re human, but we didn’t decide the release dates - you did. When some makes a promise we expect them to hold it! It’s better to say “it’s done when it’s done” than “expect awesomeness on saturday!”
Oh, but you liked the soundtrack, right?
Michael Koziarski said,
June 5, 2008 @ 10:32 pm
Most programmers may well be suspicious of marketing, especially when there’s an ‘enterprise’ in the name. However in this case the code is available and the benefits are real.
The work you guys are doing is fantastic, don’t let vague discontent get you down. The stuff you have is great, don’t let people make you feel guilty about promoting it.
remi said,
June 6, 2008 @ 3:25 am
Hongli, the ‘over marketing’ can feel weird and, honestly, I was initially turned off by it. But then I started using mod_rails and it’s great - just what the community needed. THEN, you supported Rack … that was HUGE for me and many more. And WSGI! And when I saw that the full Rack support I wanted was missing, I added it add you were awesome enough to accept the contribution and I feel proud to have helped, even in some tiny way.
You guys ROCK.
Keep up the good work … sorry that the community can be a bit touchy feely. No body wants to be sold to and the big marketing simply turned some folks off. Thank you guys SO much for opening the source so that normal people like me can contribute.
Thanks!
AkitaOnRails said,
June 7, 2008 @ 1:11 am
Some people can’t hold the jealousy. I know what it is as I suffer that myself within my own community.
Let’s face it, anyone criticizing Phusion is dying on jealousy because they are smart, they created a very clever solution where everybody else failed or didn’t even try, they made a successful debut, they just came back from Apple’s mother-ship and of course some people will be absolutely jealous.
They can do whatever they want with their own stuff. The “rules” of open source is: if it is not released nowhere, it is not public. Now they released it and it is public, and free as in speech. There is absolutely nowhere that states “how” one should release something.
Marketing is a VERY important component. Hype is very important mechanisms. Every successful product started with good marketing. There are many ways to do it, the Apple way is one of these ways and it works, no matter what the pundits say.
So, please, unless you have a real legal complaint, back off and let the guys work. You’re unhappy with the way the publicized their product? Sue them. Bitching around just screams ‘jealousy’.
Phusion Passenger is awesome. Ruby Enterprise Edition (and you would have understood the meaning if you have read the announcements) is also amazing.
Kudos to the Phusion guys, keep going with the awesome work.
‘Nuff said.
mike said,
June 10, 2008 @ 5:26 pm
Hongli, just ignore these haters, negative & jealous detractors and push forward! Don’t waste your time defending yourselves and put that energy into the products instead!
You guys did everything right and we all owe you a debt of gratitude for helping the community so hard!
Bless you!
Mike
austin_web_developer said,
June 16, 2008 @ 11:05 pm
I couldn’t believe my eyes reading this thread.
A guy takes issue with the folks at Phusion because
- Their product has ‘Enterprise’ in the title
- Their release FREE products ‘late’ (late being 2 excruciating weeks)
- You want them to be more ‘modest’ (have you heard of the guys at 37 signals?)
- The marketing seems to slick and something ‘fishy’ is going on?!?!
- Then claims that the ‘rails community’ will not embrace you guys because of these laughable quibbles …
what a joke.
Please, ignore these trite and negative comments and ’shake the haters off’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt3_I1rvlCs).
You’re changing the fundamental direction of Ruby of Rails adoption by doing this, so keep doing the awesome work you are doing on Passenger. And if you happen to make a couple of bucks along the way … more power to you.
You guys have definitely earned it.