<<
And Ruby needs better marketing.
>>
Exactly. There are too many Ruby products that stay in version 0.x for
a long time. The OCI8 product that motivated the original email could
be 1.0 now, I'd suspect. The developer is either too modest, or has
tons of features he wants to include between it's current version of
0.1 on the way to 1.0.  (Labelling a product 1.0 if undeserved is not
better marketing, it is false and misleading marketing.)  Also, if a
tool developer with a 0.X product is not anymore interested in
improving it or cannot find the time to do so, the developer must
declare that product development is dead, so that others may give pick
it up, or start their own, particularly if this is the only product of
its kind. 
gk