I'm sad to see _why go too. The Poignant Guide single-handedly made me  
passionate about learning ruby. I printed and bound a copy of it so I  
could hold it tightly to me all the day long. :)

I hope we hear from him again some day.


On 24/08/2009, at 3:36 PM, Jason Nah wrote:

> Raises a bigger issue about open source projects and the 'bus'  
> number they carry. Certainly makes me think twice before I use a  
> library written by one guy.

I have to say I disagree with this. Particularly now that we have  
tools like git (not that git is unique in this sense, but it is a good  
example) - by itself, the fact that _why deleted all his public repos  
doesn't matter. All you need to know is the SHA1 of the tip of each  
branch. The code is mirrored in countless places; in fact I probably  
have most of his code on my laptop (at least hpricot and potion).

In fact, people have already started maintaining forks of his  
libraries, and eventually some of those forks will become the de-facto  
canonical versions.

The important thing is that the code, its history, and the history of  
its development (in mailing lists, etc) is public—whether it was  
originally written by a company, a bunch of mates, developers  
scattered across the globe, or a single guy.

If I was scraping HTML today, I wouldn't think twice before choosing  
hpricot for the job. After all, it's not as if the code starts to  
rust :)

Ben


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