Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter who productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It really does take a village to raise great infrastructure. The Ruby on Rails framework of today is a lot more productive than the one I was using before it was open sourced. I use features every day created by others, enjoy polish done by others, evade bugs caught by others. All work I would otherwise have to do myself. So I simply get more done for less effort than it would otherwise have taken. The same holds true for the other open source projects that have been cultivated in 37signals, like Prototype and Capistrano.

Web hosting provider CyberHive Web Hosting has announced it is now hosting Web sites created using Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is an open-source framework that enables developers to easily assemble rich and dynamic Web sites, and has set a new standard for ease of development and speed of delivery.

The Ruby language is generating a great deal of buzz in the software community these days. Developers are becoming interested in Ruby for a various reasons such as its promise of increased productivity, the power of the language itself, or simply its ease of use. At the same time, many who are new to Ruby wonder if it's capable enough to be used in enterprise software development.

BountySource.com have released the first version of their web-based SVN browser, written in Ruby on Rails, under the GNU GPL license. The bsSvnBrowser relies heavily on AJAX to allow user-friendly browsing of Subversion archives 'with all the trendiness of a Web 2.0 application.'

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the programming world's latest star platform, writes: 'In the wake of open source, traditional hiring practices seem like an unnecessarily risky way to hire new employees. Especially for small teams where each hire can make it or break it. Why bet the composition of your collective on abstract indicators, hearsay, and a biased bio?'