IronPython and IronRuby in Debian and Fedora

By Michael Foord -
Microsoft software is not what you might expect in Debian and Fedora / Red Hat (although perhaps it's commonplace now), but this is what C.J. Adams-Collier has been working towards.
I sent an email to the Fedora Legal list asking whether they will accept software released under the MS-PL license. My friend and former colleague, Brett Lentz mentioned that he was concerned that the Fedora folks might not accept software released under the MS-PL. So I asked. I also bcc’d a certain troll on said mail so as to get lots of flame mail. I’m practicing to become a master twitterbaiter.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legal-list/2009-August/msg00017.html
In addition, IronRuby/IronPython/DLR may make it in to FC 13, thanks to Brett.
It looks like the upload of the Iron* languages to Debian is imminent. We’ve gotten the debian/watch file downloading a tarball of the git tag we’ve chosen for this release. This was the last bit meebey needed in order to present it to the maintainer of ironpython in lenny. He has agreed to let the Debian CLI Libraries Team adopt ironpython under the conditions that our packaging doesn’t suck and that he remains in the uploaders list.

Now that we have a package suitable for review, we have now presented it for said review.

Let me take a moment to mention how excited I am to be involved in packaging for Debian one of the first pieces of DFSG-compliant software sponsored by Microsoft. This is a true community effort with great work done by a lot of hard-working contributors. I believe that Microsoft has put its money where its mouth is with this project.
As with the great Mono kerfuffle, this hasn't passed entirely without comment.
I was reading a post on Monologue this morning and there was a post getting IronPython & IronRuby into Redhat (I'm assuming the rpm repositories) and it got me thinking about this. My biggest question to this is, WHY?
I posted a response on this blog entry:
Because IronPython and IronRuby both work fine on Mono and are just as useful in environments using Mono as they are in environments using .NET.

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