James McGovern throws the gauntlet down to the Ruby crowd again, challenging them to get something published:

Folks reading this blog entry need to consider adding him to their blogroll... Awhile back I threw out the challenge to the Ruby community that if within thirty days, they could get a single Fortune 100 enterprise whose primary business isn't technology to tell a story in a public forum (conference or magazine) about how they used Ruby to develop an enterprise application (aka system of record) that I would make a sizable donation to a mutually agreed upon charity. I still have my money in my pocket.

He repeats the challenge further down in his post. The thing is, non-technology companies have no real motivation to do that. If problems are being solved, they tend not to care how it was done - at least in the corporate marketing and executive suites. In the standards/architect groups, and in IT groups, on the other hand, they tend to be overly concerned with following the herd, due to the perceived safety - see my post earlier on that.

The people who most need to wonder about potentially better ways of doing things are the architects and IT managers. Asking for case studies - which will have to flow from the Marketing group - isn't going to move the ball forward.