Sun's JRuby Team Jumps Ship To Engine Yard 77
itwbennett writes "'To be honest, we had no evidence that Oracle wouldn't support JRuby, but we also didn't have any evidence that they would,' said Charles Nutter, explaining why Sun's entire 3-member JRuby team will be leaving the company to work for application hosting company Engine Yard. Nutter called getting hired by Sun about two-and-a-half years ago and being given the chance to work full time on JRuby a 'dream come true.' And said that the decision to leave Sun came down to making sure 'JRuby will get to the next level.'"
Re:So lemme make sure I got this right... (Score:5, Informative)
But they would be even stupider not to ask for a counter-offer from Oracle before formally jumping ship.
Except they're in the nebulous legal gray zone where the Sun Board has approved the deal, but DOJ & the SEC haven't given their blessing yet. The companies continue to make decisions and operate as separate entities, and people can actually get in legal trouble for attempting to do otherwise.
So... They couldn't go to Oracle and ask, and Oracle couldn't have given them an answer if they did.
Re:So lemme make sure I got this right... (Score:4, Informative)
In the aftermath of a buyout, three employees trying to jack their soon-to-be-former employer for a raise is a recipe for negative attention.
The thing about the aftermath of a buyout is that the purchaser (legitimately) takes months or years to understand what they've bought, and decide what to keep and what to prune. Unless Oracle bought Sun to get Jruby, then calling attention to yourself by seeking a counteroffer is a good way to move to the top of the "keep or cut?" list, and in a way that makes cutting all the more likely.
And generally speaking, "large, deep-pockets organization(s)" are no more stable than a startup, from the grunt's perspective. At any moment, you're one spreadsheet away from being laid off to improve the quarterly statements.
Re:JRuby is a failure. (Score:3, Informative)
And we're seeing a lot of speed improvements coming down the pike with Ruby 1.9 and Rails itself should prove to be significantly leaner and more modular with Rails 3.
Best luck to JRuby team (Score:4, Informative)
I used to work with Charlie Nutter and Tom Enebo years ago, when we worked on the same Web team. And I was thrilled to hear when they moved to Sun, really was the best deal you could imagine. Note that JRuby wasn't actually bought by Sun, but remained a separate project, only the developers were paid by Sun to work on JRuby. So I wish them the best as they move to their new digs.
Good luck, guys!
Re:JRuby is a failure. (Score:5, Informative)
So we take one of the slowest and most bloated virtual machines for static languages, the JVM,
Boy, do you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about! JVM one of the slowest VMs? You need to get your head out of the '90s. It's one of the fastest now. And JRuby is one of the fastest Ruby implementation. (Definitely faster than Ruby 1.8, which is dreadfully slow.)
You're correct that Ruby's dynamic typing doesn't go well with JVM's static typing, which is why Scala is much faster than JRuby. Still, the JVM is so impressive, and Ruby nice enough to work with, that JRuby is still a pretty good idea.