Martin Fowler offers up his thoughts on the future of Ruby within the Microsoft ecosystem:

Overshadowing this, of course, is Microsoft's historically difficult relationship with the open source world. In the past Microsoft has gone out of its way to vilify and threaten the open source community. In recent years things have improved, but there's a real question about Microsoft's core intentions. The recent patent threats are seen by many as proof that Microsoft is still intent fighting open source to the death.

As always, he puts his thoughts on the topic together better than I ever could, so go give it a read.