Re: ActiveState seeking Lua community feedback

[Jeff Rouse <jeffr@...>]

Hi Emeka,

My apologies for the late reply. I don't believe we make the community's efforts look trivial. It is through the efforts of the community that Lua finds a strong place in the world of programming languages. People come to us with their own languages/projects every month looking for help to increase adoption or in the hope we could maintain, promote, sell their project/technology, but we must be careful to choose what our customers consider valuable.

Lua is valuable to enterprises precisely because of the effort the community has put in to create and maintain it. With our backing we can help move it to that much greater adoption, we can get some of the value enterprises derive from it and put it back into the community. Throughout our history we have sponsored conferences, hackathons, projects, contributed code, hosted sites, hosted package managers, added language support to tools, all of which has benefited both the community and businesses alike. We just need to speak to the enterprises, and their worry is the risk of code they do not control.

Cheers,

-JR

On 2016-11-02 12:19 PM, Emeka wrote:

JR ,

Why not build your own language and throw it to the world instead of painting Lua as a risk at same time you want to run a business off it.  You make the works of this community look trivial because you want to patch up a new distro.

Janus

On Nov 2, 2016 8:22 AM, "Jeff Rouse" <jeffr@activestate.com> wrote:

Hi Luiz, thanks for taking the time to respond.

On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 12:16 PM, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:

> I'm proud to say that in 2017, we will be providing a community-
> and enterprise-ready Lua distribution on a variety of platforms,
> shaped in part by the feedback we receive from the community.

Very nice.
Perhaps you could give more details on what your Lua distribution is.
Does it include external libraries and tools? If so, which ones?

We will most definitely be shipping more than just the distribution, as 

we want to add as much value as we can. We often ship more than

just the standard libraries in our distros, as this makes it easiest for

people to use them. This does require some balance as we typically

don't like to start supporting a external library and then have to remove it

later due to maintenance or security issues, so we have to be choosy.

This is one of the reasons we are reaching out in order to get some

feedback on what a fantastic distribution would look

like from your perspective.

In addition any areas that the community could use our help, we would

love to hear about, as we view this as much more than a business

 

Your site says: "Why take risks with open source Lua and community support".
I don't see any risks in open source Lua. What do you have in mind?

The risks for an enterprise is that they need to make sure of issues

like getting timely support, a contractual obligation for service,

assurances and timely security fixes. In many cases they need

the backing of a commercial entity to feel comfortable and in 

some cases this is a legal or compliance requirement. To

them it takes risk away. So its important for us to speak to

that. It in no way reflects on how the community supports

the language.

Cheers,

-JR