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Unicode again / I start spreading FUD

I, like many others, have been plagued by the lack of Unicode support in Ruby and consequently in Rails. While I did not follow the discussion around it in great detail I stumbled over it again in an article on InfoQ. In here, DHH gets quoted as saying

...as Morten Christensen pointed out; shouldn’t 5 or more plugins for internationalization indicate quite clearly that the Rails community craves unified support implemented in the core?

No, DHH answered, from the Core Team’s point of view, this means that people want to support and implement internationalization in a lot of different ways, and that there is no universal solution that will make everybody happy. Even inside the Core Team people can’t agree how it should be done. Although, DHH added, I can’t rule out that the 37signals needs internationalization, is the day that Rails get it.

Quite frankly, this arrogance drives me up the wall. And more important, it proves that the people who argue that RoR is proprietary have a point. It might be OSS, but its evolution seems to depend largely on one man's opinions (aka the good tyrant). This might be good (see Linux, Spring), but it imposes risks on you if you rely on the evolution of RoR in some way. In know, this sounds like spreading FUD, but DHH needs to listen more me thinks.

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