IDGNS: You remind me a bit of Linus Torvalds talking about Linux 10 years ago.

DHH: It's almost impossibly hard to design things for other people. You build it for yourself, that's what you have to do, and then you'll create something you like and you really want to use, and then other people will like it too.

There's no way to co-opt and infiltrate us because we don't have commercial pressures. I couldn't care less whether a corporation or a business adopts Rails or not. I'm building Rails for me, so there's not a lot of pressure they can apply. They can't say, add this functionality and we'll get a thousand extra customers for you. That won't work. They're going to have to win arguments on technical merits.

IDGNS: How would you characterize Sun's and IBM's relationships to Rails?

DHH: I think they recognize what developers want, they are recognizing there is great enthusiasm and passion for Ruby on Rails, and they don't want to miss out on that. To a large extent, they are following the passion, the excitement.

We don't want to work in these big environments like .Net and J2EE. I know some people inside of Sun know what's going on, but whether they as a company choose to accept the lessons I don't know. In some ways, Rails is a rebellion against J2EE, but at the same time, they're doing great work with JRuby and Unix level tools like DTrace. Like any big company it's going to have different factions inside. I welcome Sun and IBM to come in and offer services.

IDGNS: How many Rails committers are there?

DHH: We're 12 people in the core group who have commit access. Then there are hundreds of people who contribute improvements for their own benefit.

IDGNS: How old are you and what was your background before you created Ruby on Rails?

DHH: I'm 27. I worked with PHP and Java, they were my main background. I was mostly doing PHP on my own, and I worked at a Java shop for a period of time. It was J2EE to some extent and otherwise Java in general. Those were the two forming influences. With Ruby On Rails, I tried to form the best of both worlds to make it as quick as PHP and as solid and clean as something like Java.