I've said this before, but the biggest takeaway from the balsamiq story seems to be: put your head down and focus on making a great product, everything else will follow.

I'm actually toying with the idea of shipping the source code to my first game when I release it. The game will be pretty large-scale (it's 3D, as just one example) so the game engine's source code could potentially be very valuable. However, I feel that I shouldn't necessarily keep it closed-source, because the profits from actually selling the game would far outweigh profits from licensing the engine, so it wouldn't be tactically wise to spend time on trying to license the code. Therefore, the closed-source model doesn't really provide a competitive advantage, so why not open-source it?

A potential problem with "open source on launch" is that someone could immediately clone the product and sell it for less. Except they can't. In the case of my game, I'm going to copyright all of the art assets and other game data. To clone the game, they would need to copy and redistribute that game data, which is illegal, which means I could sue them and shut them down. It would be an annoyance, but it doesn't make sense for them to do that anyway, so I doubt many people will try.

Also, piracy isn't a problem for the "open source on launch" model. In the case of desktop products, releasing the source code would allow pirates to easily circumvent any copy protection embedded in your code. But the thing is, it's easy to crack a closed-source program's copy protection anyway. It won't cause additional people to pirate your desktop product. And if your product is server-side, then by definition it can't be pirated.

Lastly, consider this. If it's harmful to open source a propriety application, then there should be examples which support that conclusion. However, can you find just one example of a company that failed or was harmed because they open-sourced their application? Id Software has released the source code to many of their games (Doom, Quake 1, 2, and 3, etc). Quake 3 generated over a billion dollars in revenue, and yet its source code is free to all. And it's very unlikely that Id was hurt by that decision.

It seems like source code protection is one of those logical fallacies that's easy for most people to believe, as long as they don't think about it too much. (Like "the world seems flat, so therefore it must be flat".)

There are two types of people who go to college for engineering: those who truly love coding, circuit design, mechanical design, etc, and those who do it for lack of a better thing to do.

The first type are the ones who stay up late hacking, read up on the news, and keep themselves on the bleeding edge. They're the ones who know what they're doing.

The second type invariably just does the coursework needed to pass and get his degree. He's usually incompetent when it comes to his field of study, because his brain is filled with thoughts of paychecks and bonuses, not technical problems.

We don't need them. And I'm sure when the tech industry takes a tumble next time they'll all be gone again, to whatever field promises to be lucrative.

"Did not!"

"Did so!"

...

Etc., etc.

Honestly, neither of these guys need us feeding their egos. They've contributed some decent infrastructure for web hacking, but if they want to have a he-said/she-said argument, that's their business. I personally don't want to waste any more time on their little ego-fest.

Let's turn this into a thread about Passenger, instead, since both of them seem to be blessing it as the next great thing for Rails deployment. Personally, I've been nervous about using it in production, mainly because I don't yet trust that it isn't going to interact poorly with my rewrite rules and authN/Z setup. Apache configurations can feel a bit like voodoo even when modules aren't stomping all over each other, and the interaction of Passenger with mod_rewrite, in particular, seems like it could cause breakage.

That being said, once you get the thing packaged and installed (which wasn't as easy under Debian as I'd like), it does save a lot of resources compared to a Mongrel-based deployment. I've seen a drastic reduction in RAM usage, as well as a major decrease in the number of idle database connections lying around in inactive Mongrel backends.

I'm all for gay rights, but this article's premise is completely ridiculous.

And market the hell out of it.

The Balsamiq approach to marketing (market the success story) is quite similar to that of 37Signals, actually, and both essential and very effective.

Giving something away -after- it has earned you a billion is less risky than doing it -before- you've earned the money.

Let's settle it now:

* Mongrel wasn't leaking.

* DHH clearly appears to have misspoken.

* But DHH also clearly said the leaks were in his application code.

The rest of this post is just more-of-the-same drama from Zed.

This time, instead of bizarro rants about Ruby security, or the play-by-play of the crank calls he gets, we get to hear about how Mongrel destroyed his career and how Rails will destroy the Passenger team. I can't see how this stuff has any relevance to me, as a professional developer, at all. If you can't make time to contribute to open source projects without screwing up your career, don't do it.

Although this little feud is getting old, I'm also looking forward to DHH's response. It will be interesting to see if his comment about Mongrel was simply an oversight or a cheap shot lie. I think it shows a total lack of class on the part of DHH to publicly speculate on a blog about Zed's mental well-being so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it was the latter.