<i>But who wants to spend time contributing when there’s no money to be made or fame left to be had?</i><p>Yeah, who would? Open source is not about altruism. It's about either money or ego. If there are neither of those to be had, what's the point?<p>However, there is plenty of money and ego left to be had in the Ruby community. The last few years have been about "hey, programming can be fun." Most of us knew this already, but some people assumed that Java was all there was (thanks to JavaSchools). The Ruby community, I think, made it OK to use non-Java languages and still be taken seriously. But with that out of the way, it's time to get serious. It's time to fix the ruby's memory leaks. It's time to tighten up the libraries. People who work on this will get money and fame, trust me.<p>I have been doing Perl for a long time. Even though I keep hearing that it's a dead language, I know for a fact that there is plenty of fame to go around for library authors and people that work on the core. So there is no need to leave the Ruby community if you want fame and want to use Ruby. (And if you don't like Ruby, why not give Perl a try ;)<p>(I should also point out that it took the Perl community almost 10 years to get a really solid implementation that didn't leak memory (it took until 5.10.0). The Ruby community has a lot of work ahead of them.)