RadRails dying off?

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:02:00 +0000

Kyle Shank of the RadRails team has mentioned that he and Matt are both working on a web startup. Looks like the priority of RadRails is lower for them - after all, RadRails doesn't make money.

It's a shame that this sort of thing happens, but I can't say I'm all that surprised. I've been working on RDT for nearly 4 years now and I can definitely say that people just don't pay for free things. You can beg for donations, but you shouldn't expect them. Given the amount of time and effort - and the sheer number of downloads - it just doesn't pay the bills to run an open source project that passively solicits donations. I estimate the per-user donations for RDT to be at about 1.4 cents*. And if we take out the one large donor? .00071 cents per user.

That doesn't quite cut it for rent and food, unless of course you get the entire world to use your product.

I wish Kyle and Matt well and hope that others from the community step forward and help lead the project onward.

Update: Looks like RadRails isn't dying off - it's getting new ownership.

* This estimate assumes we count RadRails users as RDT users, because RadRails contains RDT. It also uses just the raw zip downloads from Sourceforge for both projects. There is a large number of users we are not counting here who have downloaded via Eclipse's update site mechanism, and who use RDT from other distributions available.

Late to the Party: RadRails dying off?

RadRails dying off?