Re: Its a bird, its a plane, its.. um, an Attribute based System?

On Friday 02 April 2010 03:25:10 pm thunk wrote:
> And I would be most glad to share THAT, but it would take time and
> resources that I simply do not have.

You don't have time to simply upload it to Github?

> I cannot spend my time on
> documenting a framework to give away,

Plenty of people seem to find that time, but even without documentation, some 
code -- or, hell, at least some *code samples*. It might be difficult for me 
to explain to people what Rails is and why I like it, but it gets a lot 
simpler when I can actually show them:


class User
  has_many :posts
end

class Post
  belongs_to :user
end

User.find_by_name('Joe').posts << Post.new(:subject => 'Hello', :body => 
'Hello, world!')


Someone who understands a relational database would immediately get the idea 
of what the above is supposed to do, and might start to understand why Rails 
is so cool. It also doesn't give away the details of the implementation, if 
that's what you're paranoid of.


Regardless, you seem to have a TON of time to rant about it here. How much 
time have you spent posting to this list already, attempting to tell us what 
this is all about, when you could have posted it in a tenth of the time?


> There is also a consideration that rather drives me to distraction.  I
> would be most glad to share 100% of everything with somebody I know to
> trust, the offer has been made,

I don't know if you're saying that someone's already offered to buy it, though 
I'd find that surprising.

Here's the problem: If you can't even explain it properly to a group of 
professional and very bright Ruby developers, how can you hope to explain to a 
business type what it entails, certainly to the point where they'll fund you? 
If your intention is to sell it, you should at least be able to sell us.

> what I cannot relate to is having it
> "out there" 24/7 for anybody to do anything with - including coming
> straight at me in my little but necessary domain of interest.

If it's so very domain-specific, why are you bothering the list?

If it's not...

Rails started out as part of BaseCamp, which is a domain-specific app. 
37signals extracted Rails from BaseCamp, so they didn't have to share their 
domain-specific stuff, just the framework it was built on.

And as a result, there's a strong Ruby on Rails community from around the 
world which works on improving Rails -- not to mention Ruby. All of this 
benefits 37signals, again without exposing them to competition in their 
specific area.

So the question is, are you in the business of selling development tools, 
libraries, frameworks, etc? Or are you selling something else?

And is this something that truly is tightly bound to your domain? Or is there 
something very cool and abstract that could be extracted?

Now, to be fair, it would take some amount of time to extract it into a 
library or a framework. That's time you should probably spend anyway -- it's 
probably a better design and a useful refactoring.

> once something is on the web you have
> basically given it away to anybody to do anything with...

Well, no, you could also release it under a restrictive license (such as the 
GPL), or no license at all, all rights reserved. At that point, if it does 
become a problem, you can sue.

Note that both Ruby and Rails are under the MIT license, last I checked -- for 
all of the above reasons.

> My track record is real, it involves real professors with a pedigree
> traceable to Dr, W. A. Shewhart, and Dr. W. Edward Deming and
> the"Statistical Control of quality" movement into software that I was
> proud to play a role in.

That's great.

While you were there, did you take a technical writing course? I'd strongly 
recommend that. A strong pedigree does very little if you can't express your 
ideas.