As soon as Microsoft announced that IronRuby would be opened up for external contributions, it was unclear if this meant the DLR or not.
The answer is. Not.:
The DLR will be released with the MS-PL license, but it will likely not ever accept contributions. This was a bit of a shocking statement to me when he said that but then he explained it. It was a bit of a gloss-over though so I’m not sure that people caught this. The DLR will ship inside of the CLR which ships inside of Windows. Therefore, they can’t accept submissions to the DLR because they need to keep that IP pure.
When he said that a lot of things snapped into place for me. I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of that myself. If they don’t keep the Windows IP pure, they are opening themselves up for potential lawsuits from someone who’s IP was injected into Windows without the proper licensing in place and so on.
