Wayne Kelly, leader of the open source Ruby.Net development project, announced last week that he intends to discontinue development of Ruby.Net and join up with Microsoft's IronRuby open source efforts. This might sound good on the surface, but it is a bad idea.

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.

Last April (April-29-2010) there was a local event in Ecuador organized by AESoft, the Ecuadorian Software association. This event was names “Integrated Technologies” and was sponsored by Microsoft, CodePlex, Port25 and The Apache Foundation. On this conference Microsoft sent a message saying that they are Open Source friendly and they support Open Source development.

In my last post, I discussed reasons why an open source government would be a good thing. Now I will tell you my plan for how an OSG would operate (using the USA in model). It is essential to understand that this is not a left vs right issue. The idea here is simply to empower the people of any given country, and allow those people to rule their own lives.

Open Source methodology has gained some ground in one of the last places you and I might expect: In the development area of corporations. Consultants are calling environments like Sourceforge Enterprise Edition a Digital Development Environment.

One minute ago Microsoft made one of its first "open source" moves under the new Microsoft Reference License: the team in Redmond announced they'll make some .NET libraries available. I say "open source" because to me, open source means you can easily access a .tar or .zip of the code. Microsoft's effort is a bit more cumbersome.

Novell is working with Microsoft to help Microsoft cooperate and contribute to open source projects under open source licenses, and sticking with the existing standards to do so. Keen observers of the tech industry might note that this is a bit of a rarity, but it’s something that I hope we’ll see more of from Microsoft.

Oh sure. Microsoft loves open source. If your open source company is willing to admit Microsoft owns Linux, acknowledge the legitimacy of its proprietary standards, and put “whatever Microsoft wants.”

Longtime readers may remember my 2006 post on the “open source incline.” I wrote there is a relationship between how open a license is and the community support a project generates. Even while it has sprinkled itself in open source waters Microsoft has generally stayed at the top of both this and the development incline I described in 2008.