Rob Conery seemed to stir up quite a firestorm in his post earlier today about imploding rails. I enjoy reading Rob’s posts and really appreciate his contribution to the community, but on this one, I have to disagree with him.

Rob Conery rails DHH (no pun intended) for using the term “fuck you” in a presentation. Rob stated that DHH used the term when explaining to his audience who he is writing rails for. However, as has been pointed out previously, Rob has clearly misstated the use of the word. The presentation centered on people saying that Rails is not ready for the enterprise and this is what he tells them.

I wonder though who has the bigger history of saying “fuck you” to the community. Did Microsoft say “fuck you” to the community by not leveraging the community’s work into NUnit and creating their own version? What about MSBuild vs NAnt? How about TFS vs SVN? How about System.Web.MVC instead of MonoRail? I wonder if Jamie Cansdale feels like Microsoft gave him a big “fuck you” by suing him for his TestDriven.NET addin to Visual Studio.

Rob also states that Rails team is a now vendor and not “radical mavericks”. The Rails team is anything but a vendor. They have built a web framework around things that they find value in. They have chosen to share that framework with the world. If you like and agree with their perspectives on aesthetics, then use it. If you don’t like it, maybe Rails isnt for you.

There are plenty of other frameworks to choose from. This is not about a software behemoth trying to control every aspect of your development environment. As I said in an earlier post, Rails is all about your choice to use their framework and of consistency in values and beliefs of what makes a good software project. Rails will not sacrifice the aesthetics of the code to appeal to a broader audience.

I’ll close with this: if Microsoft has gotten it figured out, as Rob claims, why are so many people leaving Microsoft development?