In article <6cc8282d.0304062145.3fcc675d / posting.google.com>,
Oliver Nelson <flxkid / techemail.com> wrote:
>
>Another thing just popped into my mind.  Are any companies doing
>commercial support for Ruby?  Are there any companies that are
>investing in extending and strengthening this language?

No commercial companies that I know of.  There's the semi-annual, 
reocurring thread about 'Active state support for Ruby?' but so far 
no visible movement from ActiveState.

>
>One more question, not really for Ruby per se, but...:
>
>On most Windows development languages, if I need a tool that does
>something that is beyond the scope of what I want to develop for an
>application I purchase a COM control.  Maybe its to play some special
>multimedia files, or advanced document imaging, or custom date/time
>controls, or a instant messaging interface, or whatever!  Is there
>anything out there for Ruby/Perl/Python/etc. that gives this for
>Linux?  Do people sell "controls" for Linux based languages that do
>these types of things?  I know there may be open source alternatives
>for some things (that might even work with Ruby), but imaging for
>example is an area where I think there probably isn't much (barcode
>detection and reading from an image, forms recognition, etc.).
>

Linux culture has tended to be a lot different in that regard.  I'm not 
too familiar with COM controls not having been on the Windows side of 
things much, but I kind'a know what you're talking about.  The Linux 
culture is much more of a potlatch (or sharing) culture.  For better or 
worse, that is probably changing as more corporations/governments adoopt 
Linux.  For now I'd say that you should google for these sorts of things 
for Linux, you might find them freely available including the source code.  

Phil