From: Gregory Seidman Date: 2007-09-13T00:41:01+09:00 Subject: Re: IronRuby On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 12:15:19AM +0900, Lloyd Linklater wrote: > I have heard disturbing things about IronRuby. The short version is > that MS wants to get into the open source arena as that seems to be > their biggest competition, but not in the way that those already there > are. I heard that they want to change the rules for open source to > insinuate themselves everywhere. I read their new version of the open > source agreement that says that if you copy the smallest bit from their > code that you MUST include the entire MS disclaimer and sundry stuff. Blah blah blah. If you don't like it, don't use it. > Also, I heard that they are going to add windows specific calls so that > the user could "optimize" his program with the "optional" calls. This > is what they did with java and Sun was outraged, sued and won. Now, MS > came out with a more or less windows specific java in the form of C#. Oh noes! You mean I might be able to integrate with the entire .NET platform in which IronRuby runs? I could make calls to various .NET libraries that aren't available on other (read: non-.NET rather than non-Windows, given that various .NET VMs/runtimes are available for various operating systems) platforms? Truly, that would be a tragedy. Oh, yeah, unless that's what I was trying to do in the first place. And if it isn't, I don't have to use IronRuby. > Are they going to do this with ruby? If so, will we be forced to write > windows ruby just to have it cross platform compatible? What are you smoking? No one's forcing you to do anything. There are several implementations of Ruby compilers/VMs/interpreters/runtimes, including YARV, MRI, Rubinius, Cardinal, JRuby, and IronRuby. Some are more mature than others. Some perform better than others. Some provide integration with platform-specific libraries (i.e. JRuby and IronRuby providing Java and .NET integration, respectively). None of them are standards-compliant because no standard exists (no, a test suite is not a standard, and neither is a reference implementation). > Has anyone else been reading these things? We've all seen it, but no one is depending on Microsoft's goodwill so no one is particularly worried. --Greg