Ruby on Rails: The Open-Source Blueprint

It would be interesting if it was further explained why it is believed that picking the MIT license (rather than a copyleft license) was a key to success. Is there anything Rails could not have done had it been GPL licensed instead of MIT?

hk1337 · 2 months ago

I wouldn't be all that surprised to hear the real reason Rails chose MIT license was because that's what everyone else was doing.

I remember there was a surge of projects on Github, almost all of them MIT license.

hakunin · 2 months ago

Wasn't Rails the first major OSS to move to Github when Github first appeared? IIRC it's the other way around: everyone started using MIT because Rails did.

Edit: Here's the initial commit in 2004, with MIT License already in there, way before Github launched in 2008 — https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/db045dbbf60b53dbe013ef...

NullCascade · 2 months ago

Some companies have strict "call the legal department before using GPL/AGPL software" policies.

pmontra · 2 months ago

But they were using Linux anyway (that's GPL 2, plus all the userland sw) especially with Rails which used to be a nightmare to run on Windows. Macs were OK.

AGPL could have been a problem though. I wonder if monkey patching a Rails class would be derivative work.

mikece · 2 months ago

gr4vityWall · 2 months ago

Is this article generated by AI? It seems to lack any substance.

tagraves · 2 months ago

I'd be shocked to learn it wasn't written by AI. The bolding and italicizing of text is exactly how LLMs typically do it.

postexitus · 2 months ago

ActiveRecord was neither the first ORM nor the best. Hibernate in Java was years ahead when AR came out - but arguably, Ruby (as opposed to Java/Spring) made it a lot more accessible.

turbofreak · 2 months ago

I’d go so far as to say most of Rails came from “look at Java, and don’t do that” sort of approach.

Which is absolutely warranted.

In my case it was 3 weeks of work on Java redone in 3 days of Rails without even knowing Ruby yet. Hibernate could have been wonderful (I don't have fond memories of it) but AR was much much better to use.