It would be interesting if it was further explained why it is believed that picking the MIT license (rather than a copyleft license) was a key to success. Is there anything Rails could not have done had it been GPL licensed instead of MIT?
hk1337 · 1d ago
I wouldn't be all that surprised to hear the real reason Rails chose MIT license was because that's what everyone else was doing.
I remember there was a surge of projects on Github, almost all of them MIT license.
hakunin · 1d ago
Wasn't Rails the first major OSS to move to Github when Github first appeared? IIRC it's the other way around: everyone started using MIT because Rails did.
Things were going quickly on the run-up to Rails moving over, but even so, Rails was pretty aggressive at jumping on GitHub when they did, and it was one of our first real "major" open source projects on the site, in hindsight. There was a huge difference pre-Rails and post-Rails.
hk1337 · 1d ago
Perhaps, yes. My main thought was there wasn't a lot of thought behind choosing the license back then.
MangoToupe · 1d ago
Github itself was written with rails, yea? Seems almost like mutualistic dogfooding.
NullCascade · 1d ago
Some companies have strict "call the legal department before using GPL/AGPL software" policies.
pmontra · 1d ago
But they were using Linux anyway (that's GPL 2, plus all the userland sw) especially with Rails which used to be a nightmare to run on Windows. Macs were OK.
AGPL could have been a problem though. I wonder if monkey patching a Rails class would be derivative work.
gr4vityWall · 1d ago
Is this article generated by AI? It seems to lack any substance.
tagraves · 1d ago
I'd be shocked to learn it wasn't written by AI. The bolding and italicizing of text is exactly how LLMs typically do it.
postexitus · 1d ago
ActiveRecord was neither the first ORM nor the best. Hibernate in Java was years ahead when AR came out - but arguably, Ruby (as opposed to Java/Spring) made it a lot more accessible.
turbofreak · 1d ago
I’d go so far as to say most of Rails came from “look at Java, and don’t do that” sort of approach.
Which is absolutely warranted.
pmontra · 1d ago
In my case it was 3 weeks of work on Java redone in 3 days of Rails without even knowing Ruby yet. Hibernate could have been wonderful (I don't have fond memories of it) but AR was much much better to use.
Lio · 24m ago
I have a similar story. I saw the Rails book in a library and decided to give a go.
It was so easy to overtake what I was working on with Hibernate and Spring.
I remember there was a surge of projects on Github, almost all of them MIT license.
Edit: Here's the initial commit in 2004, with MIT License already in there, way before Github launched in 2008 — https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/db045dbbf60b53dbe013ef...
AGPL could have been a problem though. I wonder if monkey patching a Rails class would be derivative work.
Which is absolutely warranted.
It was so easy to overtake what I was working on with Hibernate and Spring.