Unintelligible

Friday, June 1, 2007

Microsoft and Ruby

Martin Fowler’s post on Microsoft and Ruby reflects some of my recent thoughts on MS closely. As he points out, MS is a large company made up of individuals rather than single-minded giant; and as such, there are bound to be differences of opinion within the company as to the direction it should be taking, and how it should approach different situations.

My impressions is that there are two main currents within Microsoft at the moment: those who favour openness and dialogue, who show an understanding of developers’ concerns and who think that discussing these issues and their solutions openly will help Microsoft stay ahead of the pack; and those who seem more intent on responding to managers’ concerns, and who think that Microsoft’s innovations are precious IP and should be kept as far from potential competitors as possible.

Microsoft at the moment seems torn between these two currents, as the difficulties in the inception of Channel 9 (for example) illustrates. The problem for Ruby developers is to figure out which side is going to prevail; if the “open” side does, the result of collaboration with Microsoft could be a strong Ruby implementation on the Windows platform and possibly also good integration with MS’s own technologies, both of which would help further Ruby cause; if it doesn’t on the other hand, the result could be a lot of wasted time and effort which could have been spent more productively elsewhere, and possibly also a dilution of Ruby in a similar way that happened to Java with the MS Java Runtime and J#, which Ruby could take a while to recover from.

So, what to do from Ruby’s point of view? In the current situation, it’s hard to say; ideally, the best would probably be to wait for Microsoft to make its intentions clearer, which it could to by committing to implement a Ruby interpreter fully compatible with the MRI, by opening up the source code for the Iron Ruby implementation, or perhaps by issuing a Patent Non-Assertion Covenant on any Ruby-related technologies it develops. None of these may be realistic for Microsoft in the short term; efforts at openness are still relatively new at MS, and pushing through this type of measure internally probably takes a lot of time and determination. Perhaps the competition from Sun (one of MS’s traditional rivals) via JRuby combined with a better understanding of how Ruby could benefit MS could help move things forwards.

Update 4/7/2007: Martin Fowler’s post seems to have gotten those involved in Ruby implementations talking:
John Lam (IronRuby lead): Microsoft and IronRuby
Ola Bini (JRuby committer): There can be only one, a tale about Ruby, IronRuby, MS and whatnot
Charles O. Nutter (JRuby lead): A Response to Ola’s IronRuby Post

posted by Nick at 10:12 am - filed in ruby  

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