Derek Sivers have just announced that CDBaby.com is about to embark on an application rewrite that’ll replace the 90,000 lines of PHP code with an alternative built using Ruby on Rails.

CD Baby is a very successful etailer of independent music. They list 82,443 artists that together have sold 1.2 million CDs! And unlike the cartels, CD Baby is all paying back to artists — $12 million has made it back into artists’ pockets.

Derek describe the reasoning behind his departure from PHP to Ruby on Rails as follows:

Now, with Rails, there are a team of passionate geniuses contributing to this web-making framework daily. It’s small enough that you can stay on top of it, and watch this framework get more and more powerful by the week. Improvements that are pragmatic not political. People using it to make effective websites, contributing to the shared framework around it as they go. Why not take advantage of all this brilliant work?

Congratulations, Derek! And congratulations to the star team of core Rails contributors that he has chosen to assist him in the transition: Jeremy Kemper (bitsweat) and Tobias Luekte (xal). Without a doubt two of the very finest Rails developers out there. Great choice!

Also, I love how Derek prefaces his comment section:

Please no flames about Python, PHP, Java, or MySQL. My choice to use Ruby + Postgres was due to my love of them, not hate of something else

Loving Ruby, loving Rails is not about hating something else. It’s not a zero-sum game where love must be balanced with equal amounts of hate.