[MacRuby-devel] RubyMotion: Ruby for iOS

John Labovitz johnl at johnlabovitz.com
Thu May 3 15:24:40 PDT 2012


I don't really understand the issue being raised here by many people -- namely, "what would happen to my RubyMotion projects if Laurent decides to move on." If I invest time & energy into writing an app using RubyMotion, I'll still own all my code. Further, that code will (apparently) be written in fairly standard MacRuby, which already has one open implementation (on OS X, but with existing plans and ideas to port to iOS), not to mention all the other Rubies out there that might be able to run the code of my app.

To me, this seems like being afraid of writing my app in C because the vendor of my particular C compiler might go out of business. That's an understandable worry with a niche, proprietary language, but I don't see the big issue with something as well-supported as Ruby.

Of course, I would feel more hesitant if the RubyMotion environment automatically deleted itself if I didn't pay for another year of licensing, thereby making it impossible to build my project at all. But I haven't heard anything about that, so I don't count that as a high risk.

Best,
--John


On 3 May 2012, at 2:12 PM, Matt Aimonetti wrote:

> I agree with most of you, I think that Laurent deserves the financial
> backing for his work but I also have to admit that I'm worried about the
> future of MacRuby and what would happen to my RubyMotion projects if
> Laurent decides to move on.
> 
> I don't have an issue with the commercial aspect of RubyMotion, I think
> that's fair and will ensure support, continuous development and proper
> attention.
> However the proprietary aspect of RubyMotion is a bit more problematic for
> someone who strongly believes in open source. That said, none of the other
> alternatives are currently open source either. (I guess MobiRuby will be
> the first)
> 
> Currently RubyMotion is a great solution to hack/prototype small apps for
> iOS but I'll seat back and see what the community does with it and where
> Laurent will take the project.
> If RubyMotion's source code was open, I would certainly be less worried but
> I also understand Laurent's reasons.
> I'm looking forward to seeing the upcoming UI libraries and the first
> cocos2d based game written in RubyMotion and all the nice UI libraries to
> avoid writing all the Cocoa cruft.  As a matter of fact, I believe that
> RubyMotion will open the door for creative people to come up with something
> equivalent of http://processing.org/ on iOS.
> 
> That said, I'm looking forward to seeing Laurent contribute his new memory
> management system back to MacRuby and finally make it GC free since he
> proved it's totally doable!
> 
> My 2 cents worth
> 
> - Matt
> 
> 
> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Ian Ragsdale <macruby at ianragsdale.com>wrote:
> 
>> Personally I'm happy to pay for it, and in fact already have.  I'd just
>> like to see some of these improvements make their way back to the open
>> source community, and be reassured that if HipByte for some reason doesn't
>> work out, any projects I have built in MacRuby are supported going forward.
>> 
>> - Ian
>> 
>> On May 3, 2012, at 2:12 PM, Jeremy McAnally wrote:
>> 
>> The catch in situations like this is that it may have never been written
>> in the first place if Laurent wasn't able to take the time and dedicate the
>> energy full time to build it.  Personally, I'd rather fund continued
>> development of it with a license than never to have had it in the first
>> place.
>> 
>> --Jeremy
>> 
>> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 3:04 PM, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com>wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, 03 May 2012 13:15:52 -0500 Ian Ragsdale
>>> <macruby at ianragsdale.com> wrote:
>>>> That said, I'm wondering if/when any of this will become open
>>>> source?  It's been a long time since I trusted proprietary code
>>>> more than open source stuff.  Open source projects can aways be
>>>> forked or maintained by someone else, but if a proprietary company
>>>> drops support for whatever reason, your codebase depending on them
>>>> is in trouble.
>>>> 
>>>> I'm not trying to suggest in any way that you guys would do that,
>>>> but it does make me a little nervous suggesting using this to any
>>>> of my clients.
>>> 
>>> I have to agree. I have no fundamental problem with paying for stuff,
>>> but I do have trouble with a code base that can't later be picked up
>>> and actively developed by someone else if the initial developers
>>> vanish. Apologies for injecting any negativity here.
>>> 
>>> Perry
>>> --
>>> Perry E. Metzger                perry at piermont.com
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> MacRuby-devel mailing list
>>> MacRuby-devel at lists.macosforge.org
>>> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> http://jeremymcanally.com/
>> 
>> Positivity every morning: http://goodmorninginterwebs.com
>> Bowties, ties, and more: http://wickhamhousebrand.com
>> 
>> 
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