"A few people objected that it won’t fly, because it’s going to be a commercial product. I don’t think that’s the case. The Rails community adopts Macs, TextMate, and other commercial software without blinking"

The Ruby community should be more serious about FOSS, I never liked those TextMate demos, why not use emacs, netbeans or notepad++ !!! ... well here comes the day when someone is using the TextMate usage and demos to show how the Rubyiest are not serious about FOSS ...

I mean the Ruby community acuses Java of many faults, but now Java moved from closed sourced to being open sourced

Is the Ruby community willing to take Ruby in the opposite direction, are they willing to move backward!

You raise a very interesting point. I think that in the Ruby and Rails communities there are plenty of FOSS enthusiasts. Vim, Emacs, RadRails and Netbeans are all very common options. On the operating system side of things, Linux is a very common choice as well, despite the fact that many love Mac OS X.

When I made that remark I was mostly thinking about free as in beer vs. commercial. I don't think that companies and developers who adopt Rails as their tool of choice, would have trouble reaching for their wallet, for a product that significantly enhances their development experience. My remark was a way of saying that the Rails community has a track record of being able to pay for quality, be it an operating system, an editor, or hosting, and therefore won't be adverse to a product that has a price tag.

That said, I think that the communities have a good relationship with the concept of free as in speech. Many believe in the idea and actively participate in open source projects. Every other Ruby implementation is open source, Rails is open source, and almost all the plugins, gems and libraries out there are free software.

Parts of MagLev will be open source too, and this will probably benefit other implementations as well, particularly the conceptually not too distant Rubinius. I think that in the Ruby/Rails community we appreciate FOSS, but we are also pragmatic and accept the fact that some companies may opt for a different business model. The two paradigms can coexist, offering users both FOSS and commercial closed source options.

In this specific case, many Rubyists have been "suffering" due to MRI's slowness, and if the choice comes down to choosing between having a very slow implementation that is free, and a closed source one that's 30 times faster, most companies will accept the closed source compromise, especially when it comes from a company with a reputation for rock solid and mission critical VMs and architecture. And I don't feel that they can be blamed for it.

I believe the effect of MagLev will be marginal. Gemstone/S is charging $7K/year and it's not the best license they've got. This isn't going to fly in 2008: I like those guys and I am sure they'll find enough banks and airlines to sell this expensive technology to, but it won't become a popular tool for most websites: you can't compare it to TextMate, it's not a $40 one-time-purchase toy, it's your platform - and by getting into a deal like that you bind yourself to Gemstone possibly forever.

Consider Oracle, it runs circles around MySql in every imaginable category, but hey - how many people are using it?

Closed source development tools in 2008 are archaic. This is why nearly all Borland products died off, this is why XCode and Visual Studio express are free, etc. They will make some money, but at expense of hiding their technology from 99% of programming population.

If you ask me, it looks a bit shitty: they leveraged open sourced work of others (Ruby parsers, Rubinius team's work, etc) only to close their own stuff and have a nice ride charging for it. Capitalism at work.

And besides, DHH is right: MRI is fast enough for most practical purposes and this is what I'll continue using.

It's obvious that many of the existing Ruby implementations will continue to be adopted, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. It is also my understanding that they intend to adopt a business model in which they'd have a free version (that will suffice for most people's needs) as well, and they plan to make commercial versions affordable. But we don't know what they're going to charge yet, so it's really just speculation at this point.

They are going to release the Ruby parts as Open Source and it's not set in stone that they're going to keep the VM closed either. However, if they choose not to make it FOSS, it's very unlikely that MagLev will become the single most popular choice. That said, companies pay a lot of money in hardware and hosting fees, so if the speed claims were to be true, many companies would have no qualms about paying for a much faster implementation. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it's a choice, and choices are usually good.

While I'm sure it will achieve a degree of success, I can't see how a commercial product is going to become the de-facto standard.

You only have to look at the high cost of the premium Rails hosting companies. A high quality commercial VM is a no-brainer for startups with money to throw at deployment, but this is just one niche of Rails users.

For the rest of us, Ruby's upcoming 1.9 VM has almost the same astronomical performance gains as claimed by MagLev, and is completely free and almost runs Rails already.