Huw Collingbourne wrote:
 >  The 'hype' around Ruby, at present, is nowhere near to that. This may
be due
>  to the fact that Ruby does not have a big company (Sun) pushing it. This 
>  quickly brought into the Java fold many other big companies (e.g. Sybase, 
>  Corel, IBM/Lotus, Borland - even, yes, Microsoft).
>  
>  Personally I think it's much healthier for Ruby to progress at its own 
>  pace - with developers moving things forward rather than PR departments.
The Java model was a closed-source, proprietary, for-profit model. The
Ruby model is open-source, free as in freedom, and supposedly
profit-agnostic. As was Linux.

Sooner or later (I think probably no later than 2007) someone will do
for Ruby and Rails what Red Hat and others did for Linux -- find a
for-profit way to exploit the power of the language and its "killer app"
Rails and its community.

Curiously enough, Java and Solaris appear to be moving the other way.
Solaris is sort-of open source and Java will also sort-of become open
source, though the details aren't clear yet. Firefox appears to be
following the Linux model, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if
other major open source projects -- Apache, for one -- followed suit.

My point is that marketing, PR departments, hype, sales skills, the
profit motive and engineering economics are pretty much universal,
except for a few holdout "Communist" nations who "vow their destruction".