Microsoft Going Open-Source?

Earlier this week, at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (fondly known as OSCON), Microsoft confirmed its ongoing participation in the RubySpec project. It's an interesting move for a company known for their territoriality when it comes to applications and code. In fact, Microsoft's IronRuby project, a .NET implementation of Ruby, will not only contain standard Ruby libraries in its first shipping, but will also be hosted on RubyForge. RubyForge, of course, is home to hundreds of open-source projects.

The IronRuby project and its soon-to-be-created offshoot, IronRuby-Contrib--a project that will allow for collaborative work on code that supports IronRuby-- helps Microsoft integrate Ruby with its own framework. They're licensed under the Microsoft Public License, a pretty simple document not all that different from any other open-source license.

But what does this all mean? Is Microsoft really going open-source? To a degree, yes, although there's certainly more than a little benefit to keeping competitive with free operating systems like Linux. And being, as John Lam, head of the IronRuby project put it "a participant in a project" instead of the leader is also a smart (if unexpected) business move.