Microsoft has cracked open .NET a little further and surrendered some control over its development platform to the open-source community. Latest code for company's take on Python and Ruby – fine-tuned for .NET, IronPython, and IronRuby – has been quietly released under the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) license.

Microsoft's Jimmy Schementi and the IronRuby team have announced the first stable version of IronRuby, the Ruby runtime for the .NET platform's Dynamic Language Runtime

"In a very short time Ruby on Rails has gained popularity in the enterprise development community among both programmers and system managers.

Engine Yard, a software developer of cloud deployment and open source tools for Ruby on Rails applications, last week released an open source framework for building fast, high-performance Ruby applications. Called "Merb," the programming tool is similar to Ruby on Rails.

A community driven project for Ruby source code to run natively on Microsoft's .NET framework has shut down, faced by progress from an official Microsoft effort.

t seems we’ve arrived upon Microsoft open source. In the last couple of years, whenever there was discussion of Microsoft’s open source projects and efforts such as CodePlex or Port25, there was typically the standard open source response: it’s not OSI-approved; it’s not real open source.

At the Utah Open Source Conference yesterday I presented a dilemma. Briefly, the idea is that as open-source buyers grow comfortable with open source they will stop spending money on open source. This leads to tragedy of the commons-type problems and a difficulty in encouraging the creation of more open source.

The open-source development model can can be powerful and incredibly beneficial for any software development project. Yet, even most open-source projects do not follow this style of development. Today, I want to talk a bit about why this is the case, and what can be done to set your project on the right path to enjoy the advantages of the open-source development process.

Urbis.com, written completely in Ruby using the open source framework Ruby on Rails, is yet another social networking site, but with a twist: it was created by a writer, for writers.