There’s been a lot of news lately regarding Alex Payne of Twitter’s interview regarding Ruby on Rails and Twitter’s performance problems, and more about the creator of Ruby on Rails’ response. I read it and found it quite thoughtful though slightly “holier-than-thou”, but it seems like everyone now is hating on DHH. I think people missed the point, and it’s a huge one, so here it is:

If you don’t like something in open-source, just change it.

I think that what we’re really seeing is people not used to the concept of being able to take someone else’s work and change it. You see it with Wikipedia all the time, people will be like, “Well, I went to read a wp article, but it had a lot of the facts wrong”. My response? “So fix it!” It’s not that these people are lazy, or that they should be somehow expected to contribute, but they’ve simply got the corporate, “take it as-is” mindset, I find myself doing it too. The last couple years or so have been a subtle sea-change in information – the concept that you can change it. Especially in languages like Ruby, where you can (for better or worse) change almost everything in the language. DHH is saying this too, here’s the quote:

Second, when you work with open source and you discover new requirements not met by the software, it’s your shining opportunity to give something back. Rather than just sit around idle waiting for some vendor to fix your problems, you get the unique chance of being a steward of your own destiny. To become a participant in the community rather than a mere spectator. This is especially true with frameworks like Rails that are implemented in high-level languages like Ruby. The barriers to contribution are exceptionally low.

There’s a 45% chance he’s just being a tool, but take the good part out; once you get used to the fact that you can change stuff, a lot of things become a lot easier because you don’t have to “work-around” anything anymore.