All,
So I should probably let the cat out of the bag here before I get too far
along...
Given the recent influx of new competitors (Netbeans, DLTK, IntelliJ) and
our relatively slow progress on some fronts RDT has reached a bit of a
crossroads.
We are clearly getting some strong new competition that is backed by
commercial organizations with full-time developers. There are also companies
making a stir that are likely to release commercial Ruby IDEs in the near
future. With all of this happening, I'm afraid if nothing changes with our
project then we will get left behind by the others who have stronger
backing. We have no ability to employ full-time developers, nor do we really
have any donations coming in to support augmentation of our work.
So, I've decided to pursue a commercial fork of RDT and RadRails. Certianly
the aim of the project will be to make a profit, but also to help drive RDT
forward so that we are not left behind.
I've yet to work out where the line is drawn between development on the
commercial fork (Ruby Red) and contributing to RDT. It's my belief that if
all features and functionality are in full open-source then the commercial
product will have no differentation and no one will buy it (we're not aimed
at businesses, we're aimed at developers - I don't see a support model as
possible). So I'm striving to stroke a good balance between the two.
Clearly, bug fixes would be contributed to RDT. Major new code
infrastructure would as well. And if the project takes off, I'd like to
support a more cohesive set of websites/trac/etc for the project.
I'd be interested to hear everyone's thoughts on this.
Thanks,
Chris
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