Though Microsoft had initially made a commitment to creating versions of dynamic languages that are customized for .NET, recent reports make it clear that the company may be stepping back from this plan.

Much early speculation on this change in focus comes from Jim Schementi, previously the program manager in charge of Microsoft's implementation of the Ruby software known as IronRuby. Schmenti reports on his blog that the team dedicated to working on IronRuby has decreased to one employee.

According to Schementi, his departure from the company came as Microsoft began to display a "serious lack of commitment" to any .NETized dymanic languages, including IronRuby.

On his blog, Schementi reports the moment when he began to search for a job outside of Microsoft: a conversation with his manager in which Schmenti was asked "What else would you want to work on other than Ruby?"

With Schementi's departure, he reports that the only employee remaining working on .NET is Tomas Matousek, a software engineer for Microsoft. Many of the other former employees working on the system left or were reallocated as long as a year ago.

Microsoft's November reassignment of John Lam, builder of RubyCLR for writing .NET applications in Ruby, onto another project that has not been identified was one of the most significant losses and possible death knells of the IronRuby project. Lam, who has been with Microsoft since 2006 when he was hired to help tweak dynamic languages to work with .NET, came along with many other new hires around that period from the world of open source programming and scripting. Another former team member, Jim Hugunin, entered the company in 2004 to work on the IronPyton project for .NET.

According to Schementi, the loss of manpower on the IronRuby Team means that it is significantly less agile in what it can create. In his estimation, this reallocation of human resources is the direct reason behind IronRuby's absence from VisualStudio and also plays a part in the delayed release of IronPython.

While reports indicate that Microsoft has refused to provide official comment on the staffing and focus changes, it seems across-the-board budget cuts and a shifting focus can be blamed for the company's backing away from pushing their own versions of dynamic languages. Microsoft's release last mongh of IronRuby, IronPython and the Dynamic Language Runtime under an Apache Software Foundation license may indicate that the company no longer wants to be responsible for building the languages.

Releasing the languages from Microsoft's Permissive Languages (Ms-PL) may indicate that the company hopes that others will see the new licensing structure as an invitation to creation of the languages. This would free Microsoft of the expense of development and maintenance and of the languages and runtime.

Another possibility is that by removing almost all support and development staff, Microsoft wants to allow the languages to die without necessarily taking responsibility for actively killing the projects.

The company has given their reason for the licensing change as customer feedback.

Analysis suggests that Microsoft does not want to expose itself to vulnerability from potential lawsuits springing from authors of code whose work has been accepted into shipped Microsoft products. It is this wariness that has made it hard for Microsoft to fully accept the open-source development that dynamic languages require. Open-source contributions were accepted for IronRuby, but, since 2008, not for the DLR.

It seems that Microsoft wants to turn to PHP and other such options for dynamic and open source languages. It has recently tuned PHP to Windows and Azure, while focusing development efforts on its most celebrated languages, including Visual Basic and C++.