It's increasingly common for prominent open-source developers to leave IBM or other open-source-friendly companies to try their luck at Microsoft. It's not common at all for them to blog about it before actually getting a formal offer.
Yet that is what Sam Ruby, prominent Apache Software Foundation director and Atom developer, has done on his blog. Ruby was hired by IBM directly from Christopher Newport University in 1981 and has never left.
Until now. Or, rather, in about two weeks from now. Ruby writes:
I expect to receive a credible offer from Microsoft in the next two weeks. I, in no way, initiated the conversation, nor am I an any way unhappy with IBM.
We've discussed a number of possible roles, most of them focusing on open Web activities, either advocating their increased and correct use within Microsoft, and/or engaging in open Web communities on Microsoft's behalf.
Whatever the open-source development community's opinion of Microsoft, I've talked with other open-source "expats" that have ended up in Redmond, such as Tom Hanrahan, also formerly of IBM and the Linux Foundation, and Microsoft has provided interesting, engaging work for them. I'm sure that Sam's case will be no different.
But why post about the job before receiving a formal offer? Ruby notes that he is "very comfortable in (his) current job, so the most (he is) placing in jeopardy by posting (his interest in working for Microsoft) is the opportunity costs of a better job."
In many ways, Ruby's transparency is a great way for him to prepare his open-source compatriots for what might superficially appear to be an abandonment of his ideals. IBM might prefer that he not talk openly about it, but considering Ruby's stature in the open-source community, this is probably the best way to announce his imminent departure for Microsoft.
It's also a good advertisement for the changes Microsoft is making as it grows increasingly open to open source. Ruby reminds his blog readers that when he joined IBM in 1981, Big Blue, not Microsoft, was the "evil empire."
Times change. So do companies. And maybe, just maybe, Ruby will be one of the key individuals to help shape a new era at Microsoft.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Esther Schindler over at CIO.com does a great job picking apart some recent data on Ruby adoption. The (Koders.com) data, which is gleaned from language-specific searches on its code repository site, suggests that Ruby interest is up by a factor of 20 since 2004.
However, as Schindler points out, the Koders.com data may simply reveal the obvious (i.e., the Ruby community is vocal) or the not-so-pleasant (i.e., perhaps Ruby users have lots of need to look for information because of problems with Ruby).
Ruby use really isn't all that much. According to Evans Data, which asks developers twice a year about their favored programming languages, only eleven percent of North American developers use Ruby today, for any part of their work...About two thirds use JavaScript in any guise, just for comparison, but somehow that doesn't generate the same kind of passion...
[I]t also might mean that Ruby developers need more help than others do..., whether because the existing software is hard to understand or because their shops don't have a lot of existing in-house expertise. It might mean that there's so much easily-found JavaScript open-source code that they don't need to head to a dedicated search engine for it. Maybe, in their enthusiasm for all things Ruby, they just like to look at code examples.
So maybe Ruby is on a roll, or maybe it's not. The Koders.com data is inconclusive on this point. All we really know is that the Ruby community is vibrant and vocal.
But Ruby isn't about to take over the enterprise, where most of the money in software still resides. Java and .Net still rule the enterprise roost. Along with the imperfect Koders.com data, O'Reilly Media's book data points to an upsurge in Ruby development, but we're a long ways off from massive enterprise adoption of Ruby, at least in any way that threatens Java developers.
Today has proved to be much busier than expected, but there were a few interesting articles worth exploring:
- First, 63 percent of IT departments surveyed by Forrester "expect[] social technologies to impact the business world." The other 37 percent apparently don't realize just how much time their employees are wasting each day on MySpace. :-)
- Ruby on Rails hosting and optimization company Engine Yard just nabbed a $15 million Series B round of financing from NEA, Amazon.com, and Benchmark. This makes a total of $18.5 million raised so far.
- Finally, Apple sold over 1 million 3G iPhones in the first weekend alone, which is impressive given how hard they were to get for many of us. This is particularly interesting given that the overall handset market is contracting. Apple is swimming against the tide, as great products and companies do in difficult times.
TechCrunch is claiming that Twitter, that service that lets Twits tweet, is dumping Ruby on Rails after two years due to scalability problems. Twitter has responded by declaring its just as much a fan of Ruby on Rails as ever, and instead is limiting "tweets" to 139 characters (instead of the standard 140) because 140 is "taxing the system."
That one extra character must be one heck of a straw to break the Twitter back. (By the way, it seems like a rather odd way to deal with the problem. Imagine if email providers Microsoft or Zimbra boosted performance by requiring one less word per message...?)
I've heard the scalability and performance claims before against Ruby on Rails, but I've also talked with companies like Engine Yard who insist that Ruby on Rails is not inherently unscalable - it just needs a practiced hand to make it scale. Indeed, Benchmark's investment in Engine Yard was fed primarily by a desire to make Ruby on Rails more scalable.
Twitter may or may not be dumping Ruby on Rails. Who cares? There is enough investment going into Rails that any short-term deficiencies in the technology are just that: short-term.
Oddly enough, the answer to that question ("What's really going on with JBoss?") is probably best answered by someone outside Red Hat: Marc Fleury. Marc isn't shackled by the need to keep corporate secrets, though perhaps he's a little biased.
Marc offers several data points that suggest that JBoss adoption and monetization is "going through the roof." But he also takes on two potential aspirants to the JBoss throne: Ruby on Rails and SpringSource (I've sanitized Marc's comments to suit my Puritan sensibilities):
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Using book sales as surrogate tea leaves, Mike Hendrickson of the O'Reilly Radar finds life bleak for pretty much every major programming language except C#, Javascript, and Ruby. Java? It has plunged by 50 percent since 2003.
Sun Microsystems is hedging its bets on web scripting languages, recently adding Python experts to its fold. So perhaps Sun will weather the storm. Regardless, even despite its five-year slide, Java still holds the biggest share of the book-buying market, as this chart shows:
... Read moreLast week, Benchmark announced a $3.5 million investment in Engine Yard, which provides commercial support for Ruby on Rails applications. Engine Yard is doing $3 million in business and growing. It's also profitable. It didn't need the investment.
The investment, however, is very telling. When one of the top venture capital firms on the planet puts hard dollars behind a support model, it's significant. It becomes doubly so when the firm (or its investors) in question previously invested in JBoss, MySQL, SpringSource (Interface21), and other support-based open-source companies.
It may mean that Benchmark knows something that the rest of the industry seems determined to ignore: services-based businesses may well be the future of the software industry.
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