With a title similar to the one of this post, Tim Bray was sure to attract attention. In fact, I am surprised that his post did not cause a larger scale flame war. Short story: PHP, Ruby and Java frameworks are compared. Ruby wins, sort of.

While I think his analysis is quite reasonable, there was one thing that is just plain stupid ignorant. At one point, Tim comments on the exclusion of Python and .NET based frameworks from the comparison:

.NET and the Python frameworks, starting with Django, are notable by their absence here. Sorry; I just don’t have any first-hand knowledge on them. And .NET isn’t open-source, so why would you use it?

Huh? OK, you don’t have experience with these frameworks, fair enough. But to avoid .NET just because it’s not open source? Here’s one reason why you might consider .NET: it works. It has tool support as good as Java. In fact, it largely looks and feels like Java, except that (in my opinion) it has better framework (overall, not Web framework in particular). Thus, in a comparison like Tim did, .NET would probably fare roughly that same as Java.

I have worked with many open source and closed source applications/libraries in my career. I’ll take closed source library that works well over half-baked open source teenager’s-weekend-project-eighty-percent-finished any day. Open source does help when things don’t work (you can “step into” in the debugger) but as long as things work, you’re good.

Open source does not imply quality. Closed source does not imply quality too. Don’t use it as a criteria for picking the library/framework to use.