From: "Rob ." Date: 2005-04-28T23:36:55+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby and IDE John Wells wrote: > In reply to Rob, I'm curious why you've opted to go the jEdit route and to > not get involved with the RubyEclipse plugin. I choose to write Ruby support for jEdit because: 1) It seemed the quickest way for me to implement the features I wanted. I was familiar with jEdit from prior work on the XSLT and XMLIndenter plugins. 2) The eclipse interface hasn't appealed to me. I prefer the simplicity of the side-dockable windows in IntelliJ IDEA and jEdit, to Eclipse's constraining view/perspective approach. I use IDEA for Java development and jEdit for everything else. 3) Politically I find jEdit's GPL licensing terms more palatable to Eclipse's and RubyEclipse's CPL licensing. If I contribute many hours of my personal time to writing an free software Ruby editor based heavily on others free software efforts, I don't want to license that work under terms that allow a corporation to take it and release it commercially. Note that the GPL and CPL licenses are incompatible. So I can't just take code from the RubyEclipse project and neither can they take my code, unless we reach a separate licensing agreement. 4) I tend to back the underdog, often because it's the best. (Perhaps that's why I was attracted to Ruby not Python or Perl, REST not SOAP, and Topic Maps not RDF). Slava started writing jEdit when he was 15 years old. I prefer to back projects started by people solving problems, not projects started by corporations for profit (assuming IBM started Eclipse with a profit-motive in mind). Vendors and consortium's often produce bloated, overly complex specifications and software, in order to extract oligopoly profits from markets through consulting/support revenues and by putting up technical and legal barriers to entry. I don't expect anyone to agree with me. Hopefully if I write something good, you'll use it. Maybe someone will even be able to help me by writing a debugger. ;-) Cheers, Rob http://www.jedit.org/ruby/