Folks who want to work on IronRuby are more than welcome to contribute to our libraries. We need you to sign a contributor agreement and assign copyright to Microsoft, but that’s really no different than any other well-run Open Source project (well with the exception of assigning copyright to Microsoft

BTW, I have no idea who the random Silverlight guy was, but I doubt he was on the product team. Don’t believe everythng you hear

Thanks,
-John

Also, Microsoft is allowing contributions from the community back into IronRuby. And not just allowing contributions, encouraging contributions. This is a huge step and shows their commitment to having the community involved and trying to do the right thing.

The DLR is also open sourced using the same license, although contributions aren’t allowed to it because it will eventually be part of the CLR.

I could have interpreted that wrong though.

That said, I’ve been seeing alot of FUD from the Ruby community lately about Microsoft and IronRuby, and I’m getting kinda sick of it. When/if Microsoft steps out of line with respect to Ruby I’ll be the first in line to call foul. But I haven’t seen it yet. Expressing concerns is one thing, spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt is something else.

I honestly believe that Ruby has so much to offer the average .NET developer that I’m committing myself to make Ruby on .NET successful. My worst fear is that some in the Ruby community become a hindrance to adoption. That’s not the Ruby community I know and love.

The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) is an extension to the CLR (.NET Framework) that is intended to provide a common type system for dynamic languages to interoperate. The DLR has been open sourced with the MsPL license, and will be added to Mono.

IronRuby is Microsoft’s implementation of the Ruby language and runtime on the DLR. Ruby.NET was started before the DLR was announced, and is written for the CLR.

I understand the concern over IronRuby being a “real” implementation and the distrust of Microsoft, but so far those things haven’t happened. IronRuby is being developed in the open, on RubyForge. Can we keep the FUD in check until we have something that Microsoft has actually done wrong?

IronRuby is a Ruby implementation built on top of the DLR.

IronRuby can be built on Mono. So technically requires MS .NET 3.0 or Mono1.2.5 (I think).

IronRuby is hosted on Rubyforge, and if being developed in a relatively open fashion.

Ruby.NET was sponsored by MS, and as pointed out MS license chunks of Ruby.NET… which sounds pretty complimentary to me.

While I admire the enthusiasm of articles like this one, and I’m not trying to be offensive, you have to stand back, look at it and hold your hands up to effective engaging in FUD. You aren’t engaged in technical arguments here, you’re engaged in emotive political ones… and hey, that’s OK too.

What are the technical merits of Ruby.NET that you believe should encourage people to support it?… That’s a genuine question, not bait, and perhaps the answering would do more to obtain the support you feel desirable.

IF the goal is to obtain a quality Ruby implementation then the exisiting cooperation between Ruby.NET and IronRuby would seem to drive in that direction. I’m not sure that this article doesn’t just drag up old partisan attitudes.

Not having a pop at you so much as challenging you gently. I do appreciate your concerns.

As for IE… IE was held in limbo from IE6 as MS were concerned about anti-trust issues. They needed Mozilla to gain ground so they couldn’t be accused of monopolistic practices. Same reason MS maintained an MS Office dev team at Apple for so long. MS had a compelling interest in Apple remaining alive. The rise of Linux obviated that need and the team got pulled.

Yes it sucks. However MS had very real and compelling reasons for holding back on IE. They were damned if they did, and they were damned if they didn’t.

With regard to Sun/Java… Java (or more specifically the JVM) has been extended in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people that make the MS extensions with J++ look trivial. If the shoe were on the other foot MS would have been lambasted for restrictive practice with regard to a competitor over their closed source, non-specced language…. Very similar interestingly enough to Netscape/JavaScript years before. Netscape held the trademark to JavaScript and denied use of it to MS who had to call their implementation JScript. This alarmed a lot of people (and the W3C/TBL never really liked Netscape) hence we wound up with ECMAScript.

When the shoe was on the other foot with CLR/C# MS did open the spec and we’re watching the Mono team, Boo, Nemerle and others moving with the platform in all sorts of interesting ways.

See there’s a lot of things that appear black and white… and as and old school OS/2 fan, I still resent MS… but reality is normally all sorts of shades of gray.

MS is doing interesting things *technically* with languages at the moment.

If it happens we will see an explosion of Ruby work, but we will be forced to do it the MS way, which can be sure to differ greatly from the Matz way.

Thanks for supporting Ruby.Net over IronRuby.