At RailsConf2007 there was a lot of excitement over JRuby. This small team had taken a moribund project and turned it into what looks like a first class implementation of the Ruby platform on the JVM. They got a lot of cheers and deserved them all.

So with JRuby pretty much here, the spotlight moves onto the other common managed code runtime - .NET. Microsoft's intentions for Ruby are currently much less clear. They have announced Ruby as a language for scripting Silverlight - but that still leaves a lot of open questions. Is this a full implementation of the ruby language, or is some form of Ruby++ - an enhanced subset of Ruby?

JRuby serves two distinct but complementary purposes. On the one hand it's a powerful scripting language for the JVM, allowing you to weave a dynamic language into a Java application. It's second purpose is an implementation of the Ruby platform in the JVM, which allows a Ruby application, in particular a Ruby on Rails application, to run on the JVM just as well as it runs on the MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter, the current C runtime).

The big question for Microsoft's "Iron Ruby" is how compatible will it be? Will it be a full implementation on the CLR? All the signals I hear tell me that John Lam, the main force behind Iron Ruby, is determined to get a fully compatible implementation. However this may be very difficult to do as things stand. Soon-to-be-ThoughtWorker Ola Bini, a JRuby committer, reckons that it's almost impossible to figure out how to implement a Ruby runtime without looking at source code of the MRI - but Microsoft imposes drastic limitations on its employees' ability to download open source software, let alone look at the source. The open-source community does much of its communication through source code - so this makes collaboration with an open-source community very difficult.

Overshadowing this, of course, is Microsoft's historically difficult relationship with the open source world. In the past Microsoft has gone out of its way to vilify and threaten the open source community. In recent years things have improved, but there's a real question about Microsoft's core intentions. The recent patent threats are seen by many as proof that Microsoft is still intent on fighting open source to the death.

Unlike most other technology companies, Microsoft has struggled to find a way to co-exist with the open source world. It is harder for Microsoft - unlike Sun, Apple, or IBM they are overwhelmingly a software company. Open source projects like Linux, GNU, and Open Office are directly competing with Microsoft's crown jewels. However I've never felt that declaring war on open-source, trying to stamp it out, was a viable long-term solution. Open-source is here to stay, the question is how to accommodate it.

With Ruby Microsoft is in a different position to the more visible death match. Ruby doesn't compete with the core revenue generators in Microsoft's line up. What's more there is a real desire in the Ruby community to co-operate with Microsoft. Most people I talked to at RailsConf were very keen to see a full range of support for Ruby on Microsoft - and there were a lot of creative ideas floating around on how we could try to come with an approach that could make it work. The overwhelming sense I heard in the community was not "Ruby will kill evil Microsoft" but "how can we overcome the problems to get Ruby on Microsoft."

As Chris Sells pointed out, we do have to consider the question "what's in this for Microsoft". I see a couple of reasons. First off is the role of .NET and Windows in the data center. If Microsoft doesn't support the Ruby platform, it runs the risk of people moving away from .NET (and Windows) on server farms if Ruby on Rails becomes successful.

Another reason is people. Microsoft doesn't like to acknowledge this in public, but there is a real concern that AlphaGeeks are moving away from the Microsoft platform. There's a growing sense that Microsoft's vision is armies of Morts in command-and-control organizations. There often seems to be outright discouragement of tools to enable talented enterprise developers, or of agile development processes.

A few years ago my (limited) contacts in Redmond told me that they were seeing a real drift of technical leaders away from the Windows platform. More recently these signs seem to be increasing. Reading the 'softie part of my blogroll I got a sense of real disillusionment amongst people who have been long-time Microsoft supporters. Agile-oriented developers have been frustrated with the direction of Microsoft tools. Microsoft conferences barely mentioning agile processes, leaning much more to waterfall approaches. The tools, with their rigid role-separations, actively discourage the blurry boundaries that agilists prefer.

At RailsConf, Tim Bray contended that the key decisions on technology are made by the programming community. I partly agree with this. The reason we have so much bloatware in IT is because IT purchasing decisions are usually made on golf courses by people who have lost meaningful contact with the realities of software development. However golf-course decisions may dominate the short-term, but as time rolls on I think Tim's contention is true. So losing the alpha geeks may not matter this year or next, but will inexorably harm Microsoft over time.

Indeed it's already past next year for Microsoft. We've seen a noticeable drop-off in interest from our clients for Microsoft projects, particularly in the US. In Australia, .NET hasn't got any foothold at all amongst our clients. I'm not sure what to make of this data. We aren't so big to be a statistically valid sample on our own. But it's a useful data point nonetheless particularly since we like to think our clients are the "alpha IT shops".

Perhaps more significant is the story within ThoughtWorks. When .NET appeared there was a lot of interest in the platform. Many people were pleased to see a strong competitor to the Java platform and were keen to get involved on .NET projects. Yet over the last year or so there's been a big turn away from .NET. This is despite the fact that there is some really interesting things coming out of Redmond. Mike Two is very keen on the windows workflow tools, I've been very impressed by Linq and other language developments. But the general view of Microsoft technologies is a loud yawn. This is important because, as Tim O'Reilly believes, the alpha geeks point to what everyone else will be doing in a few years time. And the crucial point is that the attitude to Microsoft isn't hatred (a common attitude amongst many geeks) but boredom. This is what Paul Graham means when he says that Microsoft is dead because it's no longer dangerous.

The attitude to open-source is a large part of this problem. When Java appeared there were yawning gaps in its portfolio, and worse some dreadful standard tools in its API (visions of Entity Beans spring to mind). Those gaps and bad ideas were fixed by the open-source community. Ant gave us a build tool, EJB was displaced by Spring and Hibernate. .NET has also got its gaps, and again the open source community has stepped up to fill them. Yet Microsoft refuses to collaborate with these efforts, even seems to go out of its way to undermine them. I was particularly sickened by Microsoft's reaction to NUnit - an excellent XUnit testing tool, elements of whose design were lauded by Anders Hejlsberg at OOPSLA. Microsoft ended not just bringing out a competitive library, but deliberately making it incompatible. That's not the kind of reaction that encourages people to invest their time in the platform.

To be fair, that debacle was a couple of years ago. Actions like hiring Jim Hugunin and John Lam have helped counter that impression. Technologists like Chris Sells, Don Box, and Jim Newkirk are working to make Microsoft are a more open environment. But like any large organization, Microsoft is full of contradictory forces and we don't know which ones will prevail.

My colleague John Kordyback pointed out that at the heart of all this is realizing that Ruby is not Yet Another .NET Language but a whole community and attitude to software development. Ruby is a community where open source, agile thinking, and lightweight solutions are deeply ingrained values. He says a common problem in Redmond is that "They ask me 'Why is this language important' rather than 'Why is this thinking important?'"

So what I see for Ruby and Microsoft is an opportunity. The Ruby community seems eager to work with Microsoft. This provides an opportunity for Redmond to figure out how to deal with the problems of working with open source and for this effort to serve as an exemplar for future collaboration. A first class implementation of the full Ruby platform on .NET would be a wonderful product of this collaboration. Perhaps an even better result would be for this work to serve as an example of how Microsoft can collaborate with a community that's centered on openness and agility; an example that can be a springboard for further spreading of attitudes that can further help programmers and their customers throughout the Microsoft world.

There's been quite a few reactions to this (see Technorati for a full list). Particularly worth reading are the ones from: Sam Gentile, Cory Foy, Luke Melia, Jeremy Miller, Rockford Lhotka, John Lam, Evan Hoff, Karl Seguin, Ola Bini, Miro Adamy, Charles Nutter, Peter Laudati, Nick Malik

Update: Recently (august 2007) we've seen some very encourging signs coming out of Redmond. In particular, IronRuby will be hosted on RubyForge with what looks like a very permissive licence - Ola approves.