What a stupid comment. $44,000 is ~2/5ths of a Sr. Rails Dev's salary. If Engine Yard, Github, Joyent or Force/Heroku announced that they were going to furlough one of their senior devs to work for 5 months on the best possible OS X Rails installer, we'd be cheering them on.
But Yehuda Katz has the temerity to suggest that working directly for his end-users might be a good way to accomplish the same goal, and for that, earns snarky bullshit like this.
I was just pointing out that there is someone who wanted $25k upfront and here we have someone who will do the work for free. That's all, just context.
And since you mentioned it, $44k is a two full years salary where I live, so excuse me if I think that's a bit much for a installer script.
Other than that, I have no interest in this since I'm not a RoR developer nor am I planning on becoming one. Like I said, I just wanted to provide context.
It's like saying, "Yeah Slash or Eddie Van Halen needs 40k to record a few tracks, but this kid from across the street will do it for free."
To add to that, most open source contributors live in large metros that aren't cheap (in the West and East Asia). $25k does not even come close to covering a year in those areas.
With all due respect we're not talking about kids across the street here. We're all professional developers trying to contribute something. I'm perfectly fine with people making money especially those who have contributed so much, but is it possible to continue to contribute like we always did without looking like some kid across the street?
> With all due respect we're not talking about kids across the street here.
That was the only analogy I could think of when comparing guitarists. I didn't mean to equate both you and myself to famous programmers as children, but that's the best I could do in 5 min. My point was just to show that Yehuda isn't some average unknown panhandling for money. He's well known and he's already given a lot to the community and not to just Ruby.
I don't have a problem with anyone making money if one can. Good for him I say (the opposite was not my intention in the original comment), he found a way to make some money while doing open source software.
I don't think you understand. This isn't "a way to make some money while doing open source software"; if anything, he's probably losing money on this.
The man is taking time off his job to do something he loves for a community which he's put a lot of time into, and that's something anyone should respect.
5 months is a short waterfall dev cycle. Allocating one dev to "best possible OSX support for our dev platform" is a totally reasonable thing to slot into a cycle.
But since you don't know what you're talking about, I'm left wondering why you bothered to comment on this thread. What context could you possibly have to offer?
The level of irrational behavior dollar signs generate on HN is baffling.
Sorry I really have nothing to say to you since you apparently have some false assumptions about me and ignore what I write and I can't have a conversation that way.
There may or may not have been someone willing to do it for free, but that doesn't invalidate the effort Yehuda is willing to put in, or the price he has attached to it.
Once upon a time, my neighbor brought me a cake that they had made. It was fantastic. They weren't a professional baker, but could likely have sold the recipe to that cake, as I enjoyed it immensely.
Does this now mean that all other cakes aren't worth it? If I go to the grocery store, can I just walk out with a cake because "someone else is willing to do it for free"?
Obviously, the answer is that I can't. You're perfectly welcome to think whatever snide things you like about wycats, but it seems like kind of a douchey thing to do unless you were personally willing to provide Rails.app.
oscardelben is. Perhaps it's to make a name for himself? Perhaps it's because he believes it should be done? Perhaps it's because he believes that wycats shouldn't be charging money for it? Who knows?
It's awesome that he's doing it, and it makes him look like a big giant hero. He deserves every kudo that comes his way -- but that doesn't mean, for one second, that wycats shouldn't be able to accept money people are willing to give for a task he can perform very well. wycats is a proven developer, and doesn't need any reputation. (Not saying that oscar isn't -- I don't generally follow Rails development that closely. Apologies if he's the Linus Torvalds of Rails or something.)
And at the risk of sounding like a tool, we should probably point out that oscardelben's project isn't finished, and is described, in the Readme as "Not ready". It might take him a few months to get it perfect.
Where is the proof that rails is hard to install and needs 5 months of work? Maybe more documentation is needed on best practices but 5 months of work for a specialized installer? No thanks.
I spent a day recently trying to install Rails on my Air. I fiddled with it once back when Locomotive worked. I was expecting a nice clean drag-n-drop like that or MAMP. Instead I wasted half the day with broken Locomotive, then spent the rest of the day installing the dev tools (which space I can ill spare on my Air) and getting it running. I lost all desire to actually fuck wih it during that time. Now I want to nuke it because something's eating up all my free space and it started a little after I installed ROR. And I have no fucking idea where to start aside from just flushing the machine and restoring apps/data from backup.
So that's one piece of any data from a frustrated artist/occasional hobby coder who really never wants to touch the command line in her life. This is what it's like for a noob: scary, frustrating, and confusing.
About a year ago I opened a terminal on my Mac and typed:
$ gem install rails sqlite3-ruby
I waited a few minutes for it to finish, then made a new directory, created a new rails project, ran 'rails server', opened a browser, and it worked.
Has this changed dramatically? I'm not talking about people who want to test out 5 different versions of ruby and rails simultaneously. I'm just talking about the basic first-time rails developer who wants to get a rails env up and running quickly (which is explicitly the audience for this one-click installer).
If you want or need ruby 1.9.x, then that's a little more work. Install homebrew or MacPorts or whatever and install 1.9 through that, make sure that guy is first in the PATH, and then do the 'gem install' dance. But this is hardly something that needs 5 months of work and $40k to accomplish.
I had to use RVM and edit some config files in order to get Rails to run at all. Might not be a big deal of people who are used to that kind of thing, but it did not make a good first impression to beginner like me.
This doesn’t seem to be isolated to Rails though, Django seems to have gotten harder. I actually gave up installing Django due to a localization bug.
This isn't complicated. 3-4 months of Katz' time costs $40k. That's not a matter of opinion. So the only thing we have to discuss here is, "how much better can Katz make the OS X Rails experience in 3-4 months". As a Mac Rubyist, my guess is, "lots".
Ugh... Your tale sounds all too familiar. I had a very similar situation on my previous MBP. Tried to install some stuff (MAMP was a cohort in the chaos here too...) and ended up spending three days on the command line pretty much at that stage running commands that I copied and lasted from blogs and forums where people had posted after having similar issues but not really knowing from shit what those commands actually did.
Ended up backing away slowly and never looking at RoR again.
Honestly: I am an experienced programmer and all I could make of the install process (plus the attempted installation of some gems) was an utter dogs breakfast.
So as anecdotal evidence goes - add mine to the list please.
I'm not familiar with Locomotive but I would say that most of the time getting my environment working had to do with installing other technologies like resque, mysql, mongo, heroku, gems (devise,haml,aws-ses,rspec,cucumber,pdfkit,js-routes), etc.
I'm guessing the majority of people don't spend the majority of their time installing rails. It's all the other requirements that are needed to build out the application.
Where's the proof that Rails has achieved the platonic ideal of OS X support for a dev platform? What, not arguing that at all? Then why is it hard to understand how 5 months of Katz's time could be well spent there?
It's hard to understand because none of the tools the typical developer works with are ideal. But trying to make something perfect that already works well? It's a waste of developer time.
It doesn't work well, and many people spend a day or more setting it up correctly on OS X (there was one commenter in the thread announcing his project that said that he had spent 3 days getting it working right). That's the point.
I can see many ways he could spend 5 months making this great and configurable setup utility, and since so many people will use it if it's good, it's worth one person spending a long time on it. It will probably save 40k of value in terms of time for the world within the first day of its release, and after that, it will keep on giving.
Way to completely miss the point. We'll have a good laugh when we compare the two projects in the end. What Yehuda is coming up with will be WAY more than a simple installer. Maybe you should read his description of the Kickstarter project before you make up your mind.
I'm sorry, but what an asinine comment. This is a "Rails installer" app. This is completely different than the project you linked to on Kickstarter.
You're receiving a negative reaction here because you made a disingenuous comparison. If you honestly can't see the differences, then you have no place in the discussion.
You are, of course, welcome to your opinion, but do not be surprised when others answer in kind.
I guess you don't need $44,219 to make "rails simple again".