Last week Oracle announced it will discontinue support for Ruby in NetBeans. RedMonk’s Michael Coté doesn’t think it’s a big deal. “NetBeans was a nice tool, but it wasn’t the lynch-pin of success for that community,” he writes. “There’s a wide array of free and commercial tools out there that developers love using.”
Coté thinks that Oracle’s withdrawal of support is motivated by a lack of revenue from supporting Ruby. “Arguably, growing the ruby community helps Oracle grow the sales pie for MySQL (which they also now own), but I’m not sure that’d be big enough or a direct enough correlation for the money-minded Oracle decision makers,” he writes.
However, as analysts are urging enterprises to look elsewhere for a programming language, it’s not hard to see Oracle’s move as signaling something deeper about Oracle’s relationship to the developer community in general and to the open source community in particular. What do you think?
Also, are you a Ruby developer using NetBeans? If so, what IDE are you going to move to?
