Please excuse the language, but what the fuck is happening to our world right now?
What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"? Now you have to [1]pay $100 for the privilege of reading the mailing list for an open source project? And some guy needs $25,000 just to start it?
Guys this is...not good. Can you imagine if apache's kickstarter never got funded? If the linux kernel's didn't? What if MySQL didn't properly manage their prize levels? Now it's "I want to build an alternative social network. Bootstrap me with $200,000" or whatever that was.
Kickstarter is really cool for a lot of things, I see it [and contribute to it] for large-scale art projects (burning man), but now every hacker I know has got a $25,000 wall in front of them called "kickstarter" and they don't want to start working until they scale it.
Stop this. This is really bad.
[1]: From the page: > [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers.
What the hell is this? I have to buy a ticket to "help steer the project"? What happened to community? We're charging a cover at the door now?
Let me get this straight: so a prolific, proven open source contributor makes some money, and the community gets a problem fixed. This is a bad thing? Who loses here?
What if Yehuda's company gave him 25% of his time to work on open source - would that be different? He'd get that same $25k (or whatever), and the software would get built (and open sourced). Only difference I can see is the source of the money, so are you against the idea of companies letting their devs work on open source?
There's this attitude in the open source world that somehow developers getting directly paid for open source is evil. This is -- excuse me -- fucking bullshit. I can't think of anything better than the idea of developers getting paid to write open source software. We need to grow the hell up and understand that paying developers to write open sourced software is a good thing -- open source devs get money, and the community gets software. Again, who loses?
I don't use Rails, and I probably never will, yet I kicked in some money to help see this through. I can think of about a million worse ways I could have spent that cash.
What this is is Yehuda Katz, who has built a reputation with contributions to open source products over many years, realizing that his market value is better than "kudos" on some website.
The alternative to stuff like this is Yehuda Katz writing code for some startup that you will never see. Here's Katz finding a way to make a business out of writing open source...
... and this is a bad thing? What's wrong with you?
A lot of programmers have hangups about money. Consider whether you do as well, and if so whether this is something you've purposefully chosen because you really like what it does for your life or whether it is just accidental. If it is accidental, you may want to consider stopping.
a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers. There are fairly straightforward methods to get that much in a month (a salaried job), a week (contracting+), or a day (training event, $500 a head).
+ Stipulate that in addition to Rails he has at least one talent which makes money and this is not unreasonable at all.
b) There was no time at which OSS was not predominantly the work product of the global rich employed at corporations. This is observably true for Rails, since the list of contributors since DHH extracted it is both public and short. The Rails core team works on Rails like it is their job because...
c) ... Rails was designed to, and succeeds at, making companies great piles of money by increasing the efficiency at which they can churn out CRUD apps. Please note that is in no way a criticism. Apps running on Rails go from BCC (five figures a year) to Basecamp (eight figures a year and will probably hit nine eventually unless they already did).
d) OSS developers making money by it - I.e. The traditional accepted way to write it - does not make you personally worse off, because it increases software available to you. You may perceive that people will listen to you less because monied interests will drown out your voice. This is irrational: since the $100 you think is a lot of money only buys maybe 30 minutes of programmer time anyhow, the opinions that mattered in OSS were already those of companies which coul actually pay salaries, and someone freer with their last $100 than you are will only have epsilon more impact on "the community" than you when compared to IBM (a consulting company which staffed most Linux development) or Google (an advertising company which directly or indirectly pays the salaries of the majority of programmers working on either of the two big OSS browsers.) apache's Kickstarter was IBM realizing that they'd happily pay a billion dollars to have IIS not become the dominant server platform so they proceeded to do so.
Just chiming in to say that Yehuda Katz has given away so many work hours to Ruby, Rails and JavaScript projects - Thor being one of my favorites. If he decides to raise $25K to work on some open source project, he's more than earned the right to do so.
Another point worth making is this: let the market decide. If the market will bear $25K (one-time payment) for a Rails.app, then so be it. Your opinion doesn't matter, frankly neither does mine.
I don't really see this affecting open source projects either. You've always been able to make money from free (as in beer) open source projects (directly or indirectly), even for projects that are not widely used.
Patronage is a model that has existed as long as artists. You wouldn't be able to go see Michaelangelo's work without this model. But people have, and do, paint for free, too.
I don't see why it's a bad thing that in modern times, skilled and famous artists continue to do work for hire. The fact that Yehuda is asking for crowd funding instead of funding from an individual is just in the details.
This is something that would be personally valuable for me. He could just as easily build this and sell it on the App Store; I'd buy it too. Instead I'll donate so you can get it for free.
Who says OSS has to be all about altruism and self-sacrifice?
I fail to understand why some programmers don't like to see other programmers get paid directly for their efforts.
If open source work is not paid for directly, it is paid for by corporations. Even when people do work in their 'spare time', it is being subsidized by the corporate job that puts food on their table.
Arguing against directly funded open-source is tantamount to arguing that developers should only be able to make a living working for a corporation.
There's nothing wrong with choosing to work for corporations, but what's wrong with having alternative economic mechanisms as well?
As far as I can remember open source always has been a sponsored or subsidized undertaking as far as it concerns meaningful or central projects.
Without it, the linux kernel would be only teaching material on Finnish universities, MySQL would not exist, Erlang would be a Danish mathematician and a waiting cue formula. The basis for the ASF is the web server which was developed at the NCSA. So you're on the right track with the "Can you imagine..." question.
Whats wrong with someone who want to make a meaningful addition to OS and asks money to be able to give full attention to the project? Isn't that more realistic than to hope for loosely coordinated efforts of spare time developers?
[note: I use this term not to criticize the persons in question but to point at the focus of the contribution. Also scratching-own-itch projects can easily err on the wrong side of the pareto ratio]
No, the amount is a donation. Are you saying that people who donate to apache foundation dont have influence? you are living under a rock if your think that in open source money plays no part.
Sure you can fork an open source project and request a pull, but if the core team disagrees with it then its all the same as the above.
Kickstarter is simply a marketing technique to raise the funds from an eventual corporate sponsor I bet.
There's a lot of "you don't want someone to get paid for their work" replies to this comment. But the OP has a really good point:
> [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers.
That is a non-starter.
This is also not a $25,000 project.
I admire and am thankful for Yahuda's contributions and I'd have no problem funding a "Yahuda should get paid" Kickstarter but this particular project is lame.
well said. when i saw the link i was confused why this would be on kickstarter...just feels odd to have software development on KS, unless there is some extenuating circumstances..
As much as I like yehuda, he's tackling a non-issue here and I'm at a loss to understand how he even arrived at the project scope as he describes it.
Installing Rails on a Mac is largely trivial. It's literally 5 shell-commands, depending on the current level of breakage of rubygems (but that's a different story). Write a tutorial in your blog if you really feel this is hard for newbies.
The hard part is installing the exact same Rails on multiple Macs and deploying the exact same Rails to production servers that are not Macs. And when I say "Rails" then I mean the entire dependency chain which reaches far beyond Rails and Mysql. The hard part is having controlled service startup/shutdown scripts that work locally and across any number of servers in your production deployment. The hard part is configuration management and safely toggling dev/production/staging modes across all involved services. There's lots of hard parts; bootstrapping a vanilla rails is not one of them.
In fact: Naive bootstrapping can be harmful, just like the still virulent code-generator brain-rot in rails itself.
I make a living managing these things and have evolved multiple approaches ranging from chef/puppet, over canonical git-repositories that work cross-platform, to VMs. There is no one-size-fits-all once your stack outgrows Rails+MySQL, and it always outgrows that.
If you wanted to solve the real problems surrounding all this then a single-platform bootstrapper is nowhere near cutting anything.
For that you'd have to start writing a better chef/puppet, which are indeed more than ripe to be superseded. But this is far beyond the scope of a kickstarter project and I hope Yehuda will rather keep his focus on Ember...
As you pointed out, your problem and the problem he is trying to solve here are completely different. Your problem definitely exists, and lots of people are working hard on solving it, whether that means those working on improving chef and puppet themselves, or on other less flashy configuration management systems, or on new projects that are attempting to improve on the existing solutions in a more fundamental way. Presumably Yehuda is simply less interested in contributing to that work than in trying to solve this other unrelated problem. You may argue that this problem does not exist, but the many articles decrying how hard rails has become and the competing projects that are also working on this suggest that you are wrong.
Also, it's way more than 5 shell commands and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier.
IDK. The barriers to entry for RoR on the Mac are pretty high.
I was keenly interested in an open source open government project (Sunlight Foundation). I tried to get it running on my Mac, on my personal time. I had direct expert help (friends who dev using Ruby, Rails, etc.). I understand the tool stack was churning, something about mismatched versions, runtimes, whatever.
I gave up after three weeks.
I don't care care how "awesome" Rails is. If it doesn't work out of the box, like all the LAMPs distros, devs will find something that does.
I hate Spring, Maven, ORM and all the other webby enterprisey Java crap with the passion of a billion burning suns. But the RoR nonsense was a whole 'nother level of insanity.
I'd rather take a bat to the face, or use PHP, than try RoR again.
(I should add that my bad experience was ~1 year ago. Maybe things have improved. Alas, I've moved on to greener pastures.)
I propose a different funding model for this project. Why not approach Rails hosting vendors like Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. to fund this project, in exchange for built-in one-click deployment to their hosting environment.
Would be a win-win for the user and hosting provider.
There is a slot on the donar list for larger sponsors. I like this model, because the demand from the community will encourage those sponsors to participate. It would have higher risk of return if it wasn't in this public space.
It would also make an ideal teaching environment: getting students to learn to navigate the Rails installation is half the challenge of getting them started.
If there's someone I'd trust to do a project like this through Kickstarter it's Yehuda. And since his time isn't cheap I understand the $25,000 price tag.
To me the elephant in the room is simply would people do this for free like most open source? The Rails community is large and dedicated. If the core team started this as an official Rails project would the result be at least the same, possibly taking a little longer?
I'm interested in whatever Yehuda Katz comes up with, but I've been a Rails dev at a Mac shop since 2007? and I have never been too frustrated by getting Rails running.
Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".
That'll throw a permissions error on a default OS X install-- and your Rails newbie will definitely not know that that means "you should really use rvm".
With that said-- a shell script that installs homebrew, git, rvm, the latest ruby, the latest rails, and a handful of useful gems, then drops you right into a shell of you brand spankin' new Rails (and Heroku!) project seems... pretty straightforward. Dealing with the common edge error cases and making it look nice and user friendly might take a couple hours. I'm curious to see where the time gets spent on this project.
I've been a Rails dev since about 2007 as well and I've had some serious, serious problems dealing with Rails, gem dependencies, the version of RubyGems itself, and so on. rvm has helped a lot with that, but my last computer got so messed up when I upgraded to Snow Leopard it took me hours of configuration to get it working properly, and I had to abandon rvm entirely and start using rbenv. And then I couldn't work on half of my older projects.
In fact, it was so messed up, it motivated me to go out and buy a new Macbook (I needed a new computer anyway, but it provided a major impetus to go out and get one).
And that's just me. Even worse is the fact that I work on a lot of Rails projects with a designer who lives in Montreal, which is a good six hour drive from where I live. I've helped him get Rails set up on his computer, but it has not been easy - far from it. As a non-techie his computer is prone to all sorts of weird shit, he hates the CLI, he needs to be walked through, line-by-line, any situation involving some weird gem dependency nonsense - it's a horrible waste of my time. Imagine trying to debug someone's effed-up gem environment via a laggy screen-sharing connection while you're on deadline - it's awful!
To sum it up: this is a project worth supporting and I'm going to support it as soon as I click the 'reply' button on this comment form.
Lately it is has been getting a lot harder. The problem right now is that so many things have moved so far, that there simply isn't a known pattern that will work.
Generally speaking, you now need a compiler. If not to install something other than a quite old system ruby, then to install common gems like nokogiri.
XCode seems to change significantly every release. Not long ago, you had to download it, or get it from your system CDs. Then you had to buy it from the app-store. Then you got it for free from the app-store. Then you got the installer for free from the app-store, and had to run the installer. And today I think you get the installer, which you run, and then you go through a series of menus to get to "install command line tools" (like gcc).
Once gcc is there, then you need a ruby. There's RVM and rbenv. Those need to be found, installed (by running a curl command piped through bash), and then a ruby needs to be installed. I use RVM, which is easy enough for me, and it does install bundler by default (which is good).
Once you have a modern ruby, you probably want a database other than sqlite. For that, you usually need homebrew. Again, install homebrew, and then have homebrew install postgresql/mysql.
At this point you are almost ready to install the rails gem.
Oddly, a lot of the newer complexity has less to do with Rails, and has more to do with the Ruby ecosystem getting both older and more complex at the same time.
Every time I help a new developer get started with the rails environment, I too am amazed at how much has changed since I setup my own laptop one year ago.
I find the install even easier now thanks to RVM, which is just a copy and paste into the terminal. Same with POW, which is good for the server part of development.
But then again, all this seems easy to me, can't speak for people entirely new to development.
Getting a rails dev environment setup used to be pretty painful, but thanks to a bunch of great tools (brew, rvm, rb-env, bundler, pow), and many blog posts, things are much better now than in the past. I can easily get brew, ruby, rails, Xcode, zsh, emacs and my entire dev environment set up on a brand new computer in a few hours these days (bounded only by network and CPU), and then get to work right away.
It is a different story for someone completely new. When I have time to sit down and help my brother and friends interested in getting started building websites, I recommend Rails (or Sinatra these days). The entire first session is usually devoted to helping configure their environment, and explaining the various tools they may need to know about when they are on their own. This is before even getting to the bit about learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby. All of this is usually a complete waste of time because they have most likely lost me after typing in "cd" or "mkdir" for the first time. Yehuda's proposal nicely solves the configuration step for a beginner (the only class of developer for whom I think it is a seriously debilitating problem), but that is really the least of worries for someone new to web development in this day and age.
I installed rvm + some gems for the first time 4-5 months ago and ran into all kinds of problems. IIRC the problems stemmed from poor documentation, not poor tools. The existing tools work just fine. The problem was that the docs and intro guides are not written for someone who knows absolutely nothing about Ruby development.
I don't understand why this needs $25,000 in funding. He doesn't seem to mention where the money is all going to (I'm assuming just as 'salary' to work on it?)
Yah, rather then funding a project to make Rails easier to install on OSX (because it's not with the plethora information guides and bootstrap scripts), why not tackle real problems like concurrency and websockets in Rails.
oh god yes please I am a rails n00b who tried fooling with Rails a couple weeks ago and found the installation process INTENSELY FRUSTRATING. Especially compared to the unthinking ease of MAMP.
Gimme one .app and a directory structure I can just throw into /Applications (and later throw away if my experiments come to naught), gimme a nice control panel to stop and start Rails. Let me get it up and running on my system without hassling with the Terminal. Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible.
I feel like this is overkill. I have been using RailsReady (https://github.com/joshfng/railsready) to setup several Mac and Ubuntu boxes and it has never been more than one click.
As Rails founding fathers complained of Java frameworks bloat, today's micro-framework fans complain of Rails bloat. Quite a cycle we've come through, isn't it ?
If someone won't make the effort to learn how to get an environment up and running, what makes him think that environment will have any real user once it's ready? There's a certain value of the commitment one takes when they decide to push forward and figure things out necessary to proceed.
I tried the locomotive solution back in the day and there was a reason it died. It sucked. Installing Rails was not the problem. Learning it was.
And again, the problem with Rails 3 today isn't the install. Instead it's that:
1. There is a shit-ton of old Ruby/Rails documentation out there that confuses the living shit out of people, and this is a duck-typed language, which is fine, but it means that people are even less likely to know what the fuck is going on when the code they are trying to use from someone's blog doesn't work.
2. Most of those using Ruby on Rails are not new as they once were, so since the majority know a little more about what the fuck they are doing, they are less likely to write things for those that don't know what the fuck they are doing.
But, writing an .app won't solve that. Instead, spend that time trying to take bundler, Gemfiles, rvm, the more complex Rails directory structure, asset pipeline, etc. and simplify the whole damn thing to create Rails 4, and chalk 3 up to an oops. A lot of the changes in Rails 3 were warranted, but the additional complexity will drive people away, and that is against the soul and original intent of Rails.
Want something that people would be really interested in? A framework that makes both development and scaling EASY. Development was easy with Rails years ago, but scaling was nearly impossible because that wasn't the intent. Now people scale Rails, but it is still hard, and development has gotten much harder. That's bad, because there are already ways to learn to develop quickly, and other solutions for scaling well. Being halfass at both is a sure way to fail miserably over the long-term, and Ruby and Rails is awesome; it shouldn't fail like this.
Setting up a vagrant script would be worth more. Portable development environment (Ubuntu running in a virtual box), cross platform support, easily configurable and duplicatable, and segregated from host machine.
You never know what kind of things people are doing on their machines, don't deal with that, use vagrant.
P.S. I'm sure a rails script exists for vagrant so he could just improve that with whatever he's going to do.
I can't help but wonder how these developers that are struggling to install rails on OSX will go when it comes to setting up rails in a production environment.
So did DHH give permission to use the Rails logo for this project?????
"The use of the logo is restricted as it always is when talking about a trademark. When the logo is used in a commercial setting, such as part of the promotion of a book, it legally requires that the trademark holder has been involved and stands behind the quality of the book. If that's not the case, you're on the way to lose your trademark.
So I only grant promotional use for products I'm directly involved with. Such as books that I've been part of the development process for or conferences where I have a say in the execution."
I think crowd sourcing is a great idea. Being a professional programmer doesn't mean doing it for 120 hours a week. I'm more than happy to throw a little bit of money at something like this to have a good job be done of it.
Open source is amazing! But people have to eat. If people with great ideas and the ability to execute have to pull a contracting gig to pay their rent which takes away from important side-projects, I think that's a shame.
I'd like to see more things like this. If it means more high quality open source that helps people and saves them time, then great! I have donated $25 to this project. The direct impact it will have on me when it's complete is:
* I will be able to get designers/front-end developers up and running on a reliable rails setup without much hassle to myself.
* It's very likely they'll be able to set it up themselves.
* Programmers from other environments might be playing with Rails in 10 minutes on a weekend, enough to whet an appetite that will potentially give us a broader pool of developers to hire from.
This is great! Crowdsourcing is great! I hope he raises the cash required to focus on this and I can't wait for the result.
I decided to learn Rails this week, and just went through the process of following http://railstutorial.com (actually I'm about half through it.)
The tutorial made it extremely easy. I was up in running in an hour or two, and it only took that long because I am taking it rather obsessively slow, following all reference links, and brand new to Ruby.
Having been a Rails developer I don't have much trouble getting Rails up and going on a system. However I do have several friends who seem to have no end of trouble getting theirs setup working reliably. Given they are not full time developers, but they complain about how hard it is to get everything configured so I can see how useful something like this can be for many people looking to try out Rails.
Installing Rails on OSX is trivial. If one really needs this process streamlined, maybe you shouldn't be coding? Or maybe you should just stop using a computer?
Similar to the Svbtle drama, this is yet another post lingering on the front page that has no business here.
I thought this was hacker news. Seems more like "check out my super cool project that you can't use unless you're awesome or you pay me" news. :(
[+] [-] blhack|14 years ago|reply
What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"? Now you have to [1]pay $100 for the privilege of reading the mailing list for an open source project? And some guy needs $25,000 just to start it?
Guys this is...not good. Can you imagine if apache's kickstarter never got funded? If the linux kernel's didn't? What if MySQL didn't properly manage their prize levels? Now it's "I want to build an alternative social network. Bootstrap me with $200,000" or whatever that was.
Kickstarter is really cool for a lot of things, I see it [and contribute to it] for large-scale art projects (burning man), but now every hacker I know has got a $25,000 wall in front of them called "kickstarter" and they don't want to start working until they scale it.
Stop this. This is really bad.
[1]: From the page: > [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers.
What the hell is this? I have to buy a ticket to "help steer the project"? What happened to community? We're charging a cover at the door now?
[+] [-] jacobian|14 years ago|reply
What if Yehuda's company gave him 25% of his time to work on open source - would that be different? He'd get that same $25k (or whatever), and the software would get built (and open sourced). Only difference I can see is the source of the money, so are you against the idea of companies letting their devs work on open source?
There's this attitude in the open source world that somehow developers getting directly paid for open source is evil. This is -- excuse me -- fucking bullshit. I can't think of anything better than the idea of developers getting paid to write open source software. We need to grow the hell up and understand that paying developers to write open sourced software is a good thing -- open source devs get money, and the community gets software. Again, who loses?
I don't use Rails, and I probably never will, yet I kicked in some money to help see this through. I can think of about a million worse ways I could have spent that cash.
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
The alternative to stuff like this is Yehuda Katz writing code for some startup that you will never see. Here's Katz finding a way to make a business out of writing open source...
... and this is a bad thing? What's wrong with you?
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers. There are fairly straightforward methods to get that much in a month (a salaried job), a week (contracting+), or a day (training event, $500 a head).
+ Stipulate that in addition to Rails he has at least one talent which makes money and this is not unreasonable at all.
b) There was no time at which OSS was not predominantly the work product of the global rich employed at corporations. This is observably true for Rails, since the list of contributors since DHH extracted it is both public and short. The Rails core team works on Rails like it is their job because...
c) ... Rails was designed to, and succeeds at, making companies great piles of money by increasing the efficiency at which they can churn out CRUD apps. Please note that is in no way a criticism. Apps running on Rails go from BCC (five figures a year) to Basecamp (eight figures a year and will probably hit nine eventually unless they already did).
d) OSS developers making money by it - I.e. The traditional accepted way to write it - does not make you personally worse off, because it increases software available to you. You may perceive that people will listen to you less because monied interests will drown out your voice. This is irrational: since the $100 you think is a lot of money only buys maybe 30 minutes of programmer time anyhow, the opinions that mattered in OSS were already those of companies which coul actually pay salaries, and someone freer with their last $100 than you are will only have epsilon more impact on "the community" than you when compared to IBM (a consulting company which staffed most Linux development) or Google (an advertising company which directly or indirectly pays the salaries of the majority of programmers working on either of the two big OSS browsers.) apache's Kickstarter was IBM realizing that they'd happily pay a billion dollars to have IIS not become the dominant server platform so they proceeded to do so.
[+] [-] eaurouge|14 years ago|reply
Another point worth making is this: let the market decide. If the market will bear $25K (one-time payment) for a Rails.app, then so be it. Your opinion doesn't matter, frankly neither does mine.
I don't really see this affecting open source projects either. You've always been able to make money from free (as in beer) open source projects (directly or indirectly), even for projects that are not widely used.
[+] [-] eob|14 years ago|reply
I don't see why it's a bad thing that in modern times, skilled and famous artists continue to do work for hire. The fact that Yehuda is asking for crowd funding instead of funding from an individual is just in the details.
[+] [-] toast76|14 years ago|reply
Who says OSS has to be all about altruism and self-sacrifice?
Btw.. http://railsinstaller.org/ was funded by EngineYard... I'm not sure I see the difference?
[+] [-] rbarooah|14 years ago|reply
If open source work is not paid for directly, it is paid for by corporations. Even when people do work in their 'spare time', it is being subsidized by the corporate job that puts food on their table.
Arguing against directly funded open-source is tantamount to arguing that developers should only be able to make a living working for a corporation.
There's nothing wrong with choosing to work for corporations, but what's wrong with having alternative economic mechanisms as well?
[+] [-] route66|14 years ago|reply
As far as I can remember open source always has been a sponsored or subsidized undertaking as far as it concerns meaningful or central projects.
Without it, the linux kernel would be only teaching material on Finnish universities, MySQL would not exist, Erlang would be a Danish mathematician and a waiting cue formula. The basis for the ASF is the web server which was developed at the NCSA. So you're on the right track with the "Can you imagine..." question.
Whats wrong with someone who want to make a meaningful addition to OS and asks money to be able to give full attention to the project? Isn't that more realistic than to hope for loosely coordinated efforts of spare time developers?
[note: I use this term not to criticize the persons in question but to point at the focus of the contribution. Also scratching-own-itch projects can easily err on the wrong side of the pareto ratio]
[+] [-] lukeholder|14 years ago|reply
Sure you can fork an open source project and request a pull, but if the core team disagrees with it then its all the same as the above.
Kickstarter is simply a marketing technique to raise the funds from an eventual corporate sponsor I bet.
[+] [-] ceol|14 years ago|reply
It's like charging a cover at the door to help write the songs for the band you want to hear.
[+] [-] cfeduke|14 years ago|reply
> [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers.
That is a non-starter.
This is also not a $25,000 project.
I admire and am thankful for Yahuda's contributions and I'd have no problem funding a "Yahuda should get paid" Kickstarter but this particular project is lame.
[+] [-] swah|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanderjd|14 years ago|reply
< I see it [and contribute to it] for large-scale art projects
...What in the world is the difference?
If anything it makes more sense to fund work that is actually useful than work that is simply beautiful or interesting.
[+] [-] fady|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moe|14 years ago|reply
Installing Rails on a Mac is largely trivial. It's literally 5 shell-commands, depending on the current level of breakage of rubygems (but that's a different story). Write a tutorial in your blog if you really feel this is hard for newbies.
The hard part is installing the exact same Rails on multiple Macs and deploying the exact same Rails to production servers that are not Macs. And when I say "Rails" then I mean the entire dependency chain which reaches far beyond Rails and Mysql. The hard part is having controlled service startup/shutdown scripts that work locally and across any number of servers in your production deployment. The hard part is configuration management and safely toggling dev/production/staging modes across all involved services. There's lots of hard parts; bootstrapping a vanilla rails is not one of them.
In fact: Naive bootstrapping can be harmful, just like the still virulent code-generator brain-rot in rails itself.
I make a living managing these things and have evolved multiple approaches ranging from chef/puppet, over canonical git-repositories that work cross-platform, to VMs. There is no one-size-fits-all once your stack outgrows Rails+MySQL, and it always outgrows that.
If you wanted to solve the real problems surrounding all this then a single-platform bootstrapper is nowhere near cutting anything.
For that you'd have to start writing a better chef/puppet, which are indeed more than ripe to be superseded. But this is far beyond the scope of a kickstarter project and I hope Yehuda will rather keep his focus on Ember...
[+] [-] sanderjd|14 years ago|reply
Also, it's way more than 5 shell commands and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier.
[+] [-] specialist|14 years ago|reply
IDK. The barriers to entry for RoR on the Mac are pretty high.
I was keenly interested in an open source open government project (Sunlight Foundation). I tried to get it running on my Mac, on my personal time. I had direct expert help (friends who dev using Ruby, Rails, etc.). I understand the tool stack was churning, something about mismatched versions, runtimes, whatever.
I gave up after three weeks.
I don't care care how "awesome" Rails is. If it doesn't work out of the box, like all the LAMPs distros, devs will find something that does.
I hate Spring, Maven, ORM and all the other webby enterprisey Java crap with the passion of a billion burning suns. But the RoR nonsense was a whole 'nother level of insanity.
I'd rather take a bat to the face, or use PHP, than try RoR again.
(I should add that my bad experience was ~1 year ago. Maybe things have improved. Alas, I've moved on to greener pastures.)
[+] [-] joshaidan|14 years ago|reply
Would be a win-win for the user and hosting provider.
[+] [-] lukeholder|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicyj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marquis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|14 years ago|reply
To me the elephant in the room is simply would people do this for free like most open source? The Rails community is large and dedicated. If the core team started this as an official Rails project would the result be at least the same, possibly taking a little longer?
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".
[+] [-] Cushman|14 years ago|reply
That'll throw a permissions error on a default OS X install-- and your Rails newbie will definitely not know that that means "you should really use rvm".
With that said-- a shell script that installs homebrew, git, rvm, the latest ruby, the latest rails, and a handful of useful gems, then drops you right into a shell of you brand spankin' new Rails (and Heroku!) project seems... pretty straightforward. Dealing with the common edge error cases and making it look nice and user friendly might take a couple hours. I'm curious to see where the time gets spent on this project.
[+] [-] adriand|14 years ago|reply
In fact, it was so messed up, it motivated me to go out and buy a new Macbook (I needed a new computer anyway, but it provided a major impetus to go out and get one).
And that's just me. Even worse is the fact that I work on a lot of Rails projects with a designer who lives in Montreal, which is a good six hour drive from where I live. I've helped him get Rails set up on his computer, but it has not been easy - far from it. As a non-techie his computer is prone to all sorts of weird shit, he hates the CLI, he needs to be walked through, line-by-line, any situation involving some weird gem dependency nonsense - it's a horrible waste of my time. Imagine trying to debug someone's effed-up gem environment via a laggy screen-sharing connection while you're on deadline - it's awful!
To sum it up: this is a project worth supporting and I'm going to support it as soon as I click the 'reply' button on this comment form.
[+] [-] dboyd|14 years ago|reply
Generally speaking, you now need a compiler. If not to install something other than a quite old system ruby, then to install common gems like nokogiri.
XCode seems to change significantly every release. Not long ago, you had to download it, or get it from your system CDs. Then you had to buy it from the app-store. Then you got it for free from the app-store. Then you got the installer for free from the app-store, and had to run the installer. And today I think you get the installer, which you run, and then you go through a series of menus to get to "install command line tools" (like gcc).
Once gcc is there, then you need a ruby. There's RVM and rbenv. Those need to be found, installed (by running a curl command piped through bash), and then a ruby needs to be installed. I use RVM, which is easy enough for me, and it does install bundler by default (which is good).
Once you have a modern ruby, you probably want a database other than sqlite. For that, you usually need homebrew. Again, install homebrew, and then have homebrew install postgresql/mysql.
At this point you are almost ready to install the rails gem.
Oddly, a lot of the newer complexity has less to do with Rails, and has more to do with the Ruby ecosystem getting both older and more complex at the same time.
Every time I help a new developer get started with the rails environment, I too am amazed at how much has changed since I setup my own laptop one year ago.
[+] [-] ajacksified|14 years ago|reply
That is, except for Lion and XCode 4.2/4.3, which caused me about three lost days. 'rvm get head' and 'rvm install 1.9.3-head' fixed that, though.
[+] [-] joshaidan|14 years ago|reply
But then again, all this seems easy to me, can't speak for people entirely new to development.
[+] [-] pirateking|14 years ago|reply
It is a different story for someone completely new. When I have time to sit down and help my brother and friends interested in getting started building websites, I recommend Rails (or Sinatra these days). The entire first session is usually devoted to helping configure their environment, and explaining the various tools they may need to know about when they are on their own. This is before even getting to the bit about learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby. All of this is usually a complete waste of time because they have most likely lost me after typing in "cd" or "mkdir" for the first time. Yehuda's proposal nicely solves the configuration step for a beginner (the only class of developer for whom I think it is a seriously debilitating problem), but that is really the least of worries for someone new to web development in this day and age.
[+] [-] driverdan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwarzech|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobar2k|14 years ago|reply
Step 1: Download the "Command line tools for Xcode" here
https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action
Step 2: Install homebrew with this command
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(/usr/bin/curl -fksSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contribu...
Step 3: gem install rails
[+] [-] getsat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1qaz2wsx3edc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmoxam|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|14 years ago|reply
Gimme one .app and a directory structure I can just throw into /Applications (and later throw away if my experiments come to naught), gimme a nice control panel to stop and start Rails. Let me get it up and running on my system without hassling with the Terminal. Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible.
pledges ten bucks
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apurvamehta|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ovi256|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptown|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignorethat|14 years ago|reply
And again, the problem with Rails 3 today isn't the install. Instead it's that:
1. There is a shit-ton of old Ruby/Rails documentation out there that confuses the living shit out of people, and this is a duck-typed language, which is fine, but it means that people are even less likely to know what the fuck is going on when the code they are trying to use from someone's blog doesn't work.
2. Most of those using Ruby on Rails are not new as they once were, so since the majority know a little more about what the fuck they are doing, they are less likely to write things for those that don't know what the fuck they are doing.
But, writing an .app won't solve that. Instead, spend that time trying to take bundler, Gemfiles, rvm, the more complex Rails directory structure, asset pipeline, etc. and simplify the whole damn thing to create Rails 4, and chalk 3 up to an oops. A lot of the changes in Rails 3 were warranted, but the additional complexity will drive people away, and that is against the soul and original intent of Rails.
Want something that people would be really interested in? A framework that makes both development and scaling EASY. Development was easy with Rails years ago, but scaling was nearly impossible because that wasn't the intent. Now people scale Rails, but it is still hard, and development has gotten much harder. That's bad, because there are already ways to learn to develop quickly, and other solutions for scaling well. Being halfass at both is a sure way to fail miserably over the long-term, and Ruby and Rails is awesome; it shouldn't fail like this.
[+] [-] gauravk92|14 years ago|reply
You never know what kind of things people are doing on their machines, don't deal with that, use vagrant.
P.S. I'm sure a rails script exists for vagrant so he could just improve that with whatever he's going to do.
[+] [-] tigris|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billsix|14 years ago|reply
"The use of the logo is restricted as it always is when talking about a trademark. When the logo is used in a commercial setting, such as part of the promotion of a book, it legally requires that the trademark holder has been involved and stands behind the quality of the book. If that's not the case, you're on the way to lose your trademark. So I only grant promotional use for products I'm directly involved with. Such as books that I've been part of the development process for or conferences where I have a say in the execution."
http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-no-t...
[+] [-] ryan-allen|14 years ago|reply
Open source is amazing! But people have to eat. If people with great ideas and the ability to execute have to pull a contracting gig to pay their rent which takes away from important side-projects, I think that's a shame.
I'd like to see more things like this. If it means more high quality open source that helps people and saves them time, then great! I have donated $25 to this project. The direct impact it will have on me when it's complete is:
* I will be able to get designers/front-end developers up and running on a reliable rails setup without much hassle to myself. * It's very likely they'll be able to set it up themselves. * Programmers from other environments might be playing with Rails in 10 minutes on a weekend, enough to whet an appetite that will potentially give us a broader pool of developers to hire from.
This is great! Crowdsourcing is great! I hope he raises the cash required to focus on this and I can't wait for the result.
[+] [-] eblume|14 years ago|reply
The tutorial made it extremely easy. I was up in running in an hour or two, and it only took that long because I am taking it rather obsessively slow, following all reference links, and brand new to Ruby.
I, for one, do not see the need for this.
[+] [-] DamnYuppie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] methoddk|14 years ago|reply
Similar to the Svbtle drama, this is yet another post lingering on the front page that has no business here.
I thought this was hacker news. Seems more like "check out my super cool project that you can't use unless you're awesome or you pay me" news. :(