Aptana: Show Me The Money!

So, there’s Ruby Development Tools, which sits in Eclipse. Then there was RadRails, which built on top of RDT but stopped pretending to play nice with Java (Eclipse’s native language). Now a firm has picked up the author of RDT to work on it full time.

The product is called Aptana, and promises to be for web development what Eclipse was to Java application development. They’re even building tools to ease the pain of AJAX development.

Here’s what I don’t get: “Aptana is venture funded…”. Where’s the money? RadRails and RDT were both dying because of lack of support, and Aptana is still free-as-in-beer (might be free-as-in-freedom, too: it’s the Eclipse liscense, which I don’t really know about).

The VC backers are going to want to make some money out of this: they’re not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. So what’s the business model? This is an important question, because it lets us users know what kind of behavior we can expect from the business.