The Future of Rubinius

In case you missed it, Rubinius hit 2.0 this month. This is an incredible achievement for the many hundreds of contributors. And we are very proud to have been involved in the Rubinius project for so long, and to see it come so far.

Engine Yard has sponsored Rubinius since 2007. In fact, Rubinius was one of the first open source projects we ever sponsored. At one point, we had six people working on it! This level of commitment was necessary to accelerate development, and to help grow a smart idea into something concrete that was a viable, and even preferable, alternative to MRI.

Today, that is a reality. And with the release of 2.0, we no longer feel like the project needs any help from us to accelerate. As such, our sponsorship is ending.

Engine Yard cares a lot about open source. We’ve sponsored key projects such as Travis CI, fog, Lithium, JRuby, Rails, RVM, Ruby, Vagrant, and many others. But ending our sponsorship of a mature project like Rubinius allows us to reinvest those funds in other areas (e.g. small or early-stage projects) where they may have more impact.

This was a hard decision to make, but we know it is the right one. We’re big fans of Rubinius (obviously!) and will continue to use it. We are excited to see where the community will take the project next. And of course, we will continue to support Rubinius on our platform.