From: Bryan Zarnett <b@...>
Date: 2001-05-30T09:49:14+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:15989] Re: Ruby Standard and Enterprise Edition

I have to agree with Ben,

It's not like any of us are going to drop what we are doing and go Ruby 
Co. full time?  Hopefully 2 years from now when Ruby is really big and 
Matz gets paid lots of money to write Ruby books, and RubyConf has an 
attendance of 32,000  people we might find that it can make a few bucks.

IMHO I think the concept of "packaged" Ruby editions is important and if 
people want to attempt a small organization to promote this I think its 
an excellent cause. It's not about competing, its about getting 
something good out there in a way people can use.

The only reason it would fail is if we thought we could get rich off of 
it tomorrow.

B.

On Tuesday, May 29, 2001, at 08:12 PM, Benjamin J. Tilly wrote:

> Lothar Scholz <llothar@mailandnews.de> wrote:
>> On Wed, 30 May 2001 07:44:58 +0900, Glen Starchman
>> <glen@enabledventures.com> wrote:
> [...]
>> I think the currently nobody should think about starting an open souce
>> company, because nearly all attempts to do so failed. Only some big
>> companies are still alive but only because they have some very big
>> customers which you can't reach with a) ruby b) a small startup c)
>> without reputation.
>
> I think you are mistaken.
>
> Facts.
>
> Most attempts to found companies fail.  Badly.
>
> The dotcom disaster was predictable and widely predicted a
> long time ago.
>
> Off of the top of my head, the following small companies are
> based on open source and as far as I know are doing just fine:
> Loki, Crynwr, Sleepycat, Stonehenge, Ars Digita, Scyld,
> Aladdin...
>
> In fact I do not at this point have a strong opinion on
> whether it is better for a software company to aim or not
> aim for an open source business model of some kind.  But I
> think that it would be foolish for a small software company
> to not investigate how it can use open-source technologies
> to cut costs.  I further think that competing head on with
> open source solutions is something to think twice about...
>
> Cheers,
> Ben
>