JRuby funding at Red Hat stopped – call for sponsors

https://blog.jruby.org/2024/07/independence-day

40 10 2 years ago

blog.jruby.org

Shopify is already on the sponsors list apparently. Sharing it here since it is a fairy valuable project!

headius4• 2 years ago

After 12 years at Red Hat, it's time to move on. I'm going to need your help to keep working on JRuby, and I'm accepting sponsorships and commercial support interest right now!

If you see the value in having a strong, independent JRuby project, now is the time to step up and help ensure its future. JRuby needs you and so do I!

https://github.com/sponsors/headius

https://www.headius.com/jruby-support

brightball2• 2 years ago

Really thankful for all of your work on this project Charles. It’s an incredibly valuable tool that combines two languages which complement each other very well.

If you’re interested in how we got here, Charles did a great talk on JRuby’s history, origins and future last year.

https://youtu.be/pzm6I4liJlg?feature=shared

headius4• 2 years ago

I'm still very proud of that talk and it's one of two we decided to include on the Headius Enterprises "About" page here: https://www.headius.com/about

I hope I can return to Carolina Code Conference next year to share my experiences going independent with JRuby!

bketelsen• 2 years ago

Charlie, thanks for all your work on JRuby. It helped me smuggle Ruby and OSS into environments that were openly hostile towards both :) Good luck with the sponsors, I'm sure you'll do well.

Edmond• 2 years ago

I am the developer of Solvent, it is a polyglot web app platform for the JVM and has long supported JRuby integration as indicated here: https://codesolvent.com/web-apps/

I am not a ruby developer and even though I integrated it don't know anything about its internals. I am guessing if JRuby goes away GraalVM which supports Ruby will be its replacement?

headius4• 2 years ago

GraalVM Ruby does not integrate with Java in the same way, and not nearly as seamlessly. JRuby allows implementing Java interfaces in a direct way that optimizes better, as well as extending and importing Java classes such that they look and feel like normal Ruby classes.

JRuby runs on all JVMs with or without Graal, where the GraalVM languages are tied to that runtime. The design of those languages also incurs heavy startup, warmup, and memory footprint penalties even greater than that of JRuby or the JDK itself, and those problems are not easily solvable.

JRuby will never go away, and as long as I have a say in it, development will continue full speed ahead. We are tackling some of our long-desired optimizations now, have near parity on Ruby language features with the unreleased Ruby 3.4, and we're very excited for the future of the project.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

JRuby funding at Red Hat would conclude.

Sorry to hear, I never used Ruby but never heard a bad thing about it.

This is exactly what this IBM does a few years after buying a company, they have been doing that for close to 25 years. They should trademark that activity. So, if any other Open Source Projects were being supported in this way, they should start getting prepared :(

headius4• 2 years ago

It is unfortunate, to be sure, and I strongly disagree with Red Hat's decision to cut important projects like JRuby.

When we joined Red Hat in 2012, it was the most exciting career move of my life. A company I had long respected for its dedication to and support of OSS... this was a place I could finally do good work for the community for the rest of my career.

I was still cautiously optimistic when IBM bought the company, since for several years it seemed like the status quo would be maintained; Red Hat was very successful at driving new revenue to IBM, and investment in OSS continued apace. I guess being the most profitable division of IBM was not enough.

I wish my remaining friends and colleagues at Red Hat the best of luck.

JRuby funding at Red Hat stopped – call for sponsors

Related Stories