Friday, August 13, 2010

What will be the future of IronPython?

Long time, I know. I'm trying to get back into the swing things. Slowly but surely.

I've been reading about the latest progress regarding the Microsoft Irons (python, ruby, etc) and it has me a bit concerned. I started using IronPython at work awhile back to help me out with various tasks and it works pretty good. So I have some scripts that help me out that I now use often. A few weeks ago, Microsoft changed the license for both IronPython and IronRuby to the Apache Software Foundation License version 2.0. I thought that was a cool and inviting change to the open source community. Hell, when I heard that, I started planning on converting more projects to IronPython. That was until I read this article over at The Register. While the article targets IronRuby, it seems to hint that IronPython is not far behind. If Microsoft ends up dumping these dynamic languages, I really hope that they completely open up the source code for these languages. This includes allowing people outside of Microsoft to contribute code to the project. The ASF license is a good step forward but they need to open it all the way or these languages could fizzle out. And just when I started finding uses for ipy.

In the meantime, I'll keep my stuff as is while I watch the outcome of this as it unfolds.