[khamidou]

Again this is mixed causality. Rails did not take off because of commercial interests – besides dhh who was working on it on the side, all the initial committers were doing that for fun.

Eventually they brought rails in many commercial companies and these companies succeeded to the point they could pay people to maintain rails.

[dewey]

Rails was built in a company to build commercial products so I’d say it had commercial interests from day one.

> 37signals built Rails for Basecamp and has since used it to create all their web products.

From: https://rubyonrails.org/foundation/37signals

[stickfigure]

However it started, there's a big hosting bill and somebody has to pay it.

[weaksauce]

most of the hosting is donated for free outside of the influence of monetary donations.

[khamidou]

For sure – but maybe it doesn't have to be the side project of a non-profit whose main thing is RailsConf.

[ryoshoe]

To be fair to RubyCentral, this year's RailsConf was the last one they have planned, though it's likely that they'll shift focus to on RubyConf in its place