[MacRuby-devel] Future of MacRuby

Fri Apr 6 12:09:47 PDT 2012

On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:20 AM, Laurent Sansonetti <laurent.sansonetti at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, I'm still alive :) As you may have noticed, I have been absent
> here for a few months. 

[ Looks at Calendar]  I think it was closer to 6 months, actually, but hey - who's counting!  :-)

In any case, any sign of Laurent is always nice to see (if Matt's message accomplished nothing else, it did that), and I'm sure this project will welcome any and all contributions from him, assuming his new startup does not end up consuming him entirely despite his most optimistic predictions (startups tend to do this - I've done a couple myself).

On a more pointed note, I also hope that his message does not lead to false expectations on anyone's part that things can or will simply go back to "the way things were" because that's simply not going to happen.  As both Matt and Laurent's messages point out, things have changed and they've actually been changed for awhile now; we cannot (as much as we might like to) run the clock backwards, substituting nostalgia for pragmatism.

I would therefore strongly encourage anyone who was inspired enough by Matt's message to contemplate stepping up and trying to lead the project more as a community effort, and let me just underline the word community there again, to go back and re-read the bullet points in it.  Then by all means step up rather than simply going back to sleep and waiting for someone else to part the Red Sea and lead the project out of Egypt!  :)   The goals Matt outlined are all absolutely worth pursuing if this project genuinely wishes to have a future, and they will remain worth pursuing whether or not 0.11 gets eventually released as a binary installer or the issues around GC get resolved such that MacRuby continues to run happily in an ARC-centric new world.

While those may seem the most pressing issues in front of you now, and I encourage you to set some deadlines and target goals around them rather than hoping that they happen "eventually and somehow", they are nonetheless relatively minor points in comparison to the overall "what does MacRuby want to BE when it grows up?" sorts of questions.  If anyone feels like those questions can or should now be put back to bed, let me be the first to correct such fallacious thinking!   I've been saying for some time now how much this project truly needs to get past the manner in which it was started and transition to being a community-driven effort since all the historical hand-wringing around "what will we do without Apple?!" is just as non-productive and likely to end in stagnation and [project] death as is hoping that one person will ride in from the desert to do all the work and you can just stand around and fan him with palm leaves or something.  Those sorts of "solutions" do not scale and only lead to single-point-of-failure scenarios.  In the software industry, this is referred to as "bus insurance":   "What do we do if ${someKeyPerson} gets run over by a bus?"   This project has never really had any bus insurance, and the last 6 months have only underscored how much it really needs to have some.

Matt's message has also inspired other folks to start weighing in on this topic, as this article demonstrates, and I can only strongly encourage such discussion to continue.  I may not agree with all of the points Jonathan makes in that article (among other things, MacPorts is still very much alive and growing and has not been "replaced" by Homebrew at all) but I agree with his assertion that MacRuby has now reached the stage where it needs to stand on its own, and among other things that means it needs (I'll just keep saying this over and over again until you all go insane) community leadership.  It needs a developer team that is not dominated by any one company or individual but is broad-based enough to not constantly send the subliminal but strong message that it's just one person or sponsorship arrangement away from the death that some other Ruby distributions have suffered.  That is not simply a lesson for MacRuby but one for ANY open source project, and one I've observed over and over again through the decades (yes, I'm that old) that I have been observing and participating in the phenomenon that is Open Source Development.

Has anyone ever heard of Debian Linux?   Of course you have - it's been a hugely influential distribution, spawning any number of sub-distributions, and is one of the most well-run and respected OSS projects on the Internet today.   Do you know how it got its name?  From the concatenation of Debra Lynn and Ian Murdock, the latter being the principle founder / manifesto writer for the project.  Ian has long since moved on to other things, and he only personally ran the project for 3 years, but his project lives on because it built up a community and focused on infrastructure and tools for collaboration to a degree that few had ever seen before (its package collection still being one of the best and most professionally organized things I've ever seen in the OSS world).  The project survived the absence of its founder and went onto even greater heights after his departure, in other words, and I think that's both somewhat poetic and how things should be!   

Keep pushing.  Find a mountain you all want to climb (as a project team) and then resolve to climb it together.  The fun part is the journey, not simply standing on top of the mountain.  If that were not true, everyone would simply travel to the top by helicopter. :-)

- Jordan

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