When it comes to Ruby/Rails open source, "Hi-ho, Silver, away!" - Open Source Software Up the Stack

« Desktop open source advocates need to do some research | Main | Liveblogging the Open Source "riddle" seminar »

April 16, 2008
When it comes to Ruby/Rails open source, "Hi-ho, Silver, away!"

Many people much younger than me know the name of the Lone Ranger’s horse even though the TV show went off the air in 1957 (according to Wikipedia). The concept of the silver bullet (as in “there is no silver bullet”) and the masked man’s accompanying call to action live on everywhere. But few remember the name of the Ranger’s faithful companion Tonto’s faithful companion.

What’s that have to do with open source software (OSS)? Stick with me here.

My recent blogpost on FiveRuns genned up a little interest and illustrated to me the vibrancy and potentially disruptive nature of the Ruby/Rails ecosystem to the relatively stable open source development model. (Note I said “relatively stable.”) An example is information I received subsequent to the FiveRuns post from Derek Haynes of Highgroove Studios, which has been stealth marketing an open source server monitoring and reporting application for the last few months.

On April 15, Highgroove “went public” with its project. If you already know that its name is Scout, you are already a kemo sabe to Ruby and Rails. (I could go on about the fact that Tonto was supposedly an Apache but I would really be going off the rails with that one.)

Per Derek’s announcement,

“The Scout client... is a normal Ruby gem, open for development, and distributed under the MIT and/or Ruby License.”

Members of the community write Scout Plugins which are also completely open.
Derek says:

“In fact, they are surrounded and fostered by a community that encourages branching, fixes, and general openness.”

Highgroove maintains the system and the Scout Server software, where data is aggregated and users collect information about their account, is not open-source. Highgroove maintains the server, and worries about security, uptime and all those good things.

The Scout client is lean and the plugins are whatever you want them to be. There are already over a dozen, such as for permission checking, feedburner statistics, disk usage and so forth.

Hayes and his group, which has been developing in Rails since 2005, plus Scout partners (e.g., Rails Machine) are pushing the community process because it believes: