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They are paying people to add support for niche languages to their tools. IronRuby sells Visual Studio, JRuby promotes Java. MS and Sun are interested in their

• moonpolysoft 18y ago
  Of course. They can't make money directly off of Ruby. Neither can EY or 37signals. For that matter, Sun doesn't directly make money off of Java either. And Microsoft doesn't make a lot of money from .Net (it's arguable over whether you'd consider visual studio sales directly attributable to .Net.) The point here is that for EY, Sun, and MS their platforms are loss leaders for very profitable goods and services. And if those companies are paying people to work on Ruby for their platforms, that means they're betting that Ruby support will lead to greater platform adoption, which then leads to greater server sales.