IronRuby Increases Open Source Involvement
by Mike Gunderloy - Jul. 25, 2008Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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Microsoft's IronRuby project is an interesting anomaly in the software world. On the one hand, it's a bona fide open source project aimed at a compliant implementation of Ruby, one of the most popular dynamic languages for open source projects. On the other hand, it's a product of Microsoft - who many still regard as an implacable foe of open source. At OSCON this week, the IronRuby team made a group of announcements that confirm their intent to be full members of the community, despite their corporate home.
Besides a binary release of IronRuby alpha, there are three significant parts to the announcements. First, the IronRuby team is starting to contribute patches to the RubySpec project, which is designed to provide an executable specification for the Ruby language, ensuring that the plethora of new Ruby implementations all work the same way. Helping RubySpec run on Windows indicates IronRuby's continuing commitment to language purity - a welcome sign to those who still remember the worst days of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" policies.
Second, the IronRuby team has opened up a small stack of projects on open source hosting site github. These include their own branches of the RubySpec component projects, but there's also ironruby-contrib, which Microsoft's John Lam says will "provide a place where folks from the community can participate in projects that enhance IronRuby or its underlying platforms."
The third thing of interest is the opening ironruby-contrib project: Silverline, a way to run Ruby code in the browser as part of a Rails project. The licensing on Silverline is not immediately apparent: I can't find any license file in the repository. But the code is open, and it seems likely that the intent here is for an open source project.
Silverline does depend on Microsoft's Silverlight, of course, which is not itself an open source project. But many Rails developers are quite pragmatic about using closed source components on the client; I've seen plenty of dependencies on Adobe Flash for uploading, for example.
All in all, the IronRuby team's commitment to the open source process and community continues to impress. One can only hope that other groups within Microsoft will learn from their example.
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