From: Shugo Maeda <shugo@...>
Date: 2008-10-25T22:34:15+09:00
Subject: Drafting of Ruby International Standard

Hello,

I have news to tell you today.

IPA (Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan) had invited
public participation in drafting of Ruby International Standard, and
my company, NaCl (Network Applied Communication Laboratory Ltd.), was
adopted.

IPA is an affiliated organization of the Ministry of Economy, Trade
and Industry of Japan.  They supports development of open source
softwares, and have an interest in Ruby.  Ruby is spreading quickly in
the world.  However, there could be problems in some domains from lack
of officially documented language specification of Ruby, especially
among the public sectors.  That's the reason why IPA launched this
drafting project.

We, NaCl have been sponsoring development of Ruby since 1997, but Ruby
has been, and will remain Matz's personal project.  NaCl will not
claim any ownership nor control over the language.  We believe that
community driven development is the best way to develop Ruby.  So
we'll extract the language specification from implementations, and
just write it down.  We don't want Ruby to be a straight-laced
language, so take care our draft (which should be the international
standard) not to prevent free development of Ruby.

The project is just started, and we're preparing a lot of works.
We'll inform you further information in the near future.

Thanks,
Shugo