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Ruby core team takes ownership of RubyGems and Bundler

667 pointsposted 4 months ago

326 Comments

sebiw

4 months ago

I think this is the right move. Thank you to Ruby Core and Matz for stepping up and providing stability to the language and community as a whole.

delichon

4 months ago

Matz is a pillar. Remember "Matz is nice and so we are nice"? s/nice/nice and responsible/gc.

runjake

4 months ago

why’s identity reveal had nothing to do with the Ruby community. A random bad actor posted his personal details in a blog post.

The Ruby community respected his pseudonymity. Some of us already knew his name.

I don't like talking about a heterogeneous group of people in a generally negative way. I try to stick to the people I perceive as sharing the same values that are important to me. And there are many such people in the Ruby community.

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

ryandv

4 months ago

> I don't like talking about a heterogeneous group of people

> many such people in the Ruby community.

In which case, this presumes that the values you share with the Ruby community are positive - otherwise you would be talking about this heterogeneous group in a generally negative way.

This would appear to beg the very question under contention - that the values of the Ruby community are not in fact positive, but toxic; unless you wish to argue that a community can simultaneously profess positive values and still exhibit toxic behaviour.

One position offers historical (and current) examples; the other offers an impressive feat of linguistic gymnastics.

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

the_mitsuhiko

4 months ago

I think it's pretty obvious to see the difference between being nice and jumping off a bridge? Curious why this cute phrase bothers you so much.

vidugavia

4 months ago

The phrase has been weaponized in the past many times. Some figures in the community are almost as far from "nice" as possible, but you're not allowed to call that out, because "it's not nice".

zahlman

4 months ago

> but you're not allowed to call that out, because "it's not nice".

I don't know about the Ruby community, but I've seen this sort of complaint made about many other online spaces (including HN) and my general finding is that it simply isn't true. The problem is that for a proper call-out, both form and content matter, and most people in a mindset to make call-outs don't seem very interested in norms surrounding either of those things. Especially the part where part of good form is accepting that not all kind, well-meaning people have the same moral values and calculus.

kamranjon

4 months ago

Is being nice equivalent to jumping off a bridge? I think it's relatively simple to comprehend and also harmless. The guy who built this thing is nice, let's try to continue that tradition so that our community doesn't turn to shit.

squeaky-clean

4 months ago

4 months ago

Not necessarily. Your logic only holds if you assume the "behind" refers to other children.

The statement is ambiguous. I interpret it as "no child left behind THE STANDARD FOR THEIR AGE". In that interpretation, other kids being ahead of that standard doesn't mean the other kids have to be behind the standard. Every kid could be not "left behind" the standard even if some are ahead of the standard.

Of course, NCLB has a lot of other issues, but I think the name isn't the issue.

gmac

4 months ago

> "No child left behind" is logically the same as "no child gets ahead"

If by both statements you mean "all children must be in exactly the same position", yes ... but that's a wilfully obtuse interpretation.

delichon

4 months ago

It seems to be to be literal rather than obtuse to observe that it is necessary for some children to fall behind in order for others to get ahead. The slogan on its face is a wish for equality of outcome. But it's catchier than ”no child failing to meet minimum standards”.

mcphage

4 months ago

> If matz were to say "jump from the bridge", people would do it, because matz is nice?

If only the drama stopped there:

* DHH is not only considered racist / fascist due to some blog posts, but also for making Hyprland the default DE in Omarchy, developed by someone who goes by the name Vaxry Vaxerski, who is also considered fascist and racist, and thus banned from contributing to freedesktop projects due to supposed breach of CoC:

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat

* Hyprland and all its contributors are now also considered fascist from taking sponsorship money from 37signals, DHH's company, due to it being an important part of Omarchy.

https://account.hypr.land/sponsors

* Due to the fact that both DHH and Vaxry are both considered fascist / racist, Framework and its CEO (yes, that Framework) are now considered to be supporters of fascism, because Framework is sponsoring and supporting both Omarchy and Hyprland.

https://account.hypr.land/sponsors

* Cloudflare (yes, that Cloudflare) is considered to support fascism because they support Omarchy and the Ladybird webbrowser (which is a project also run by someone considered to be a fascist)

https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-future-of-the-ope...

* Last but not least, Tobi (Shopify CEO) and thus Shopify are also considered by many to be supporters of fascism when this drama started to unroll for standing by DHH no matter what when activists wanted to deplatform and ban DHH from his own creation (Ruby on Rails). Which makes the Ruby Central drama due to the involvement of Shopify even more interesting:

https://xcancel.com/tobi/status/1970944464303923687

Me? I want to hop in a time machine back to the 90s/early 00s before all this crap started and everybody was just generally nice to each other.

9rx

4 months ago

> I want to hop in a time machine back to the 90s/early 00s before all this crap started and everybody was just generally nice to each other.

The internet was never nice. It, however, did at one time require technical savvy to use. With that savvy came the understanding that computers and people aren't the same thing, so when the computer emitted something not nice you'd laughed at how quant the technology was instead of getting your emotions all tied up in a knot and try to hold a person accountable like those who have no idea about what's going on around them do.

shadowgovt

4 months ago

It turns out "the words the person are saying aren't the person" turned out to be a polite fiction as people who had been saying awful things for years online turned out to go on to act on those ideas.

We tried "Don't feed the trolls." It's how we got where we are now.

nikabkforever

4 months ago

[flagged]

philipallstar

4 months ago

> Hyprland and all its contributors are now also considered fascist from taking sponsorship money from 37signals

This methodology is definitely not how you discover fascism. But it is how fascists and communists defined and traced their enemies in the 20th century.

badosu

4 months ago

This.

While I am all for making conscious choices on what to support I can't take anything phrased like that seriously "all is contributors".

Hyprland, while inferior (imo) in some aspects to sway on the wayland tiling manager landscape is a fine piece of software that I use on my non-work computer (I still use sway for stability).

Back on the topic: I reiterate I'd be happy to avoid using or supporting projects based on non-purely technical issues (discussion on "pure technicality" omitted for brevity).

It's just... What, do I need to know every persons imo completely irrelevant opinions on whatever du jour hot political topic? Maybe the answer could be yes,

I would be fine with dropping Hyprland support, maybe I will after digging a bit more. But this whole thing just reeks to me of terminally informed and ragebaited people looking for a platform to vomit their completely irrelevant opinions, actions speak more (e.g. fostering a dangerous environment _adjacent to the project_ based on discrimination).

I just feel I want to nope out of this industry and everything related to it, it's very overwhelming.

ljm

4 months ago

Turns out guilt by association is problematic whether it’s a Gestapo tactic or a terminally online one.

People need to step back and breathe. It’s possible to feel one thing about a (frankly shite) blog post and its author without tarring everybody within six degrees of separation with the same brush, and it’s quite unsettling that people find such nuance so difficult.

preisschild

4 months ago

I know vaxry made/allowed childish & offensive comments about trans folks, but has this gotten worse? Why is he considered a full on fascist now?

> Ladybird webbrowser (which is a project also run by someone considered to be a fascist)

Do you mean awesomekling? Why is he considered a fascist?

There are definitely actual fascists in tech (like Curtis Yarvin) which I (centrist liberal, not a tankie) fully support deplatforming where possible, but why are they considered fascists?

mindcrash

4 months ago

> Do you mean awesomekling? Why is he considered a fascist?

I hope you can see this because my posts in this thread are getting attacked and downvoted.

This pretty much summarizes how it started (copied from Google):

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5823666/ladybird-web-browser...

(note that while the exact word never is seen in evidence added to this post but it sure is or hinted towards elsewhere.)

and evidenced by this its ongoing:

https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1971287738268909576

because some people disagree with things like this:

https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1966456391146606806

And there are tons more posts that show that some people are not exactly nice towards him on his X timeline.

Also there's direct proof of these accusations out there but I will not link to those out of professional courtesy for those involved (yes, some people still have that).

queenkjuul

4 months ago

Oh people were getting cancelled in the 90s and 00s

madeofpalk

4 months ago

This is all... your opinion? Or some random twitter poster? Is there an appreciable amount of folks considering all of these people and companies fascist / racist?

kbelder

4 months ago

"Everyone is a fascist except me and thee, and I'm not sure about thee."

shevy-java

4 months ago

This is not 100% correct though; I mean, your summary is good, don't get me wrong so I upvoted it. But it conflates a few issues that are not 100% related.

For instance, DHH and his fancy blog, are not 100% related or relatable to RubyCentral ousting long-term developers. There may be some connection (DHH on shopify's board, tons of ruby developers being paid by shopify and still writing "my opinion is totally unbiased" like byroot did), but there is no 1:1 overlap. For instance, I could not care what DHH writes on his blog any less. rubygems.org changing policies though - that affects me. And if shopify is in part responsible, and DHH sits on shopify and makes decisions, then yes, something changed here. But there are also people who have a vendetta against DHH and they leak into other spaces too. I am not among those people and they shouldn't try to hijack other communities either.

By the way, the Shopify ultimatum also does not explain why all other ruby devs were ousted. Ruby Central lost the narrative here. And, since they accuse Arko as the ultimate bad boy - why haven't they sued him? Why do they continue to refuse to do so? (Because they know their case would be rubbish nonsense and they would have to open up ALL emails, which may make many more people suddenly ... very funky.)

nozzlegear

4 months ago

> And, since they accuse Arko as the ultimate bad boy - why haven't they sued him? Why do they continue to refuse to do so?

As someone who has sued someone else and won, it can take months for your legal team to gather the facts, decide on strategy, and then file suit.

thayne

4 months ago

> For instance, DHH and his fancy blog, are not 100% related or relatable to RubyCentral ousting long-term developers.

It's related because it led to Sidekiq dropping their funding, which increased shopify's power over ruby central.

skywhopper

4 months ago

It’s related because from the outside it looks like DHH is pulling strings to spitefully oust the folks who brought up concerns about his radical, hateful views. So you may not care what he has to say, but if he uses his influence to exclude folks who do care, and it causes you a problem, maybe it is related after all.

4 months ago

What you believe and what you can document are two separate things.

Per the concept of "innocent until proven guilty", there is no burden on Shopify to prove they didn't do what you believe. The burden is on you to provide evidence for the motivations behind their actions.

I personally doubt Tobi got Shopify to where it was by making rash decisions based on emotions and drama.

andrewmutz

4 months ago

> Given the power dynamics, the burden of proof is on Shopify to prooave it wasn't retaliating at the behest of, or in a misguided attempt to defend DHH's honor.

That’s just a way of saying “I don’t have any evidence of what I’m claiming”

shadowgovt

4 months ago

I don't have any signal one way or the other on whether Shopify retaliated; the fact DHH is on their board I learned from this thread.

I have seen the "soft-hostile takeover" executed in other contexts, however. I don't think it's necessary to presume DHH used his influence as a Shopify board member to seal the deal or that he would have ulterior motive in doing so; in my experience, it's sufficient for a company to see a valuable piece of a puzzle they care about go vulnerable to acquisition offers to make the offer (with the corresponding stick). I'm willing to be convinced otherwise in either direction if more information presents itself; all I know is that Shopify put the offer on the table "We'll back-fill your funding gap or we'll make it much worse; your call." And I've seen that offer made in a completely capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-claw "business is business" way in the past.

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

pabs3

4 months ago

- Locking your access completely on your resources would be akin to a ransomware attack or account compromise

Would you label those actions hostile? Or just accept it as right because "maintain security"?

If you would label the above hypothetical actions as hostile (if not outrageous overreach, something akin to theft?); what is fundamentally different to what Ruby Central did by taking over the source code of a GitHub repository?

dismalaf

4 months ago

This is a bad analogy. André Arko was a contractor employed by Ruby Central. His employer terminated his contract. He continued to access their server which is literally a crime.

The "maintainers" weren't volunteers. They were paid employees.

Also none of the ones complaining were the original authors of gem nor bundler.

florkbork

4 months ago

Alright, let's extend it.

You work for Microsoft as an independent contractor, as a night watchman/groundskeeper. So do a number of others. You were hired because you and your crew of weirdos were writing the story of advanced gardening and building maintenace; which people including those at many famous and powerful companies used and found useful. A number of years ago someone said "huh, maybe these guys should get funding", and a few others agree; and Microsoft ends up in charge of distributing that funding.

The above still happens. They have locked your computer with a ransomware message that says "we will give you back access if you get rid of one of you". To lock your computer, which is airgapped, it would require someone with admin privileges to your computer to walk in and manually do this. It turns out one of your has colleagues done this, added an account for the Director of Night Maintenance at Microsoft to your machine.

You and almost all of the "paid employees", again, a number of whom are independent contractors, resign in protest; leaving only the person who tampered with your computer.

https://bsky.app/profile/duckinator.bsky.social/post/3lz6exz...

> The behavior Ruby Central exhibited was so egregious that I sincerely thought someone's account had been compromised at one point

During this chaos; which all happened between September 9 and September 18;

- at midday LA time/2:40pm New York time; Microsoft terminates the contract with one specific individual; who was the one they demanded the group gets rid of if they wanted access back - 8 hours later, that person locks the doors; changes nothing else, etc.

Some basic analysis about the situation you need to do:

- Did the actions on September 19th, even if you believe it was a crime of the most serious nature, justify the actions on Sept 9-18 where Microsoft took access, said whoopsie, then did it again?

- Treating the Sept 19 actions as a crime; did the person who did it do so with a criminal intent? (Mens rea). Did they intend harm? Or were they indifferent to the harm caused? Should this be prosecuted, has that person provided justification or similar that could in any way be reasonable doubt?

- If the actions on September 19 are a crime in your viewpoint; would paying/influencing someone to lock the accounts of all of the maintainers also be a crime? Why or why not?

Note that you'll want to read https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

First off, was anything involved a "protected computer"? No, probably not, not by the legal definition there; yes by what we as laypeople would assume.

But, let's roll with the assumption it's "literally a crime" and not a civil matter; but apply that standard equally.

> (4)knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;

* Is the draft novel/rubygems source code a thing of value? Yes. $5000 worth? Tricky to say with the open source licencing! But RC were distributing $ to maintain it; and that cost them more than $5000/year. Cost does not equal value; but I think we can argue yes, kinda here.

> (7)with intent to extort from any person any money or other thing of value, transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any—

* Did anyone attempt to extort anyone else to remove a person? (Get rid of x if you want access back!) * Did that have value? (Gee, I hope the treasurer didn't post, it was about the funding deadlines/only to have that walked back!) Also a bit murky as the value isn't coming from the extortion directly, only indirectly.

> (b)Whoever conspires to commit or attempts to commit an offense under subsection (a) of this section shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section.

* Did anyone conspire? (Two or more people agree to criminal act, followed by an overt act)

Can you plausibly see how if you try to apply US law to argue one individual on one side is a criminal; that same law would likely make the other side just as criminal; if not more so?

---

> none of the ones complaining were the original authors of gem nor bundler.

Doesn't hold water.

4 months ago

I agree with busterarm's take. Andre Arko's story omits specific concerns like ssh'ing into Rubygems in Japan 9 days after the debacle. Further, his narrative excludes his termination email and instead focuses on generic platitudes his boss sent the group, to somehow prove Andre didn't know he was fired.

All in all, I don't see sound judgement from Andre Arko or from RubyCentral. That seems the common takeaway from neutral third parties https://archive.md/SEzoV

> Regarding Arko’s blog post about his removal, McQuaid [Homebrew Maintainer] told me it’s good that Arko is crediting other people for their contribution and that he’s following open source principles of community and transparency, but that “his ‘transparency’ here has been selective to things that benefit him/his narrative, he seems unwilling or unable to admit that he failed as a leader in being unwilling or unable to introduce a formal governance process long before this all went down or appoint a meaningful successor and step down amicably.”

dluan

4 months ago

I don't know enough of the fine details, but I believe Andre when he says he was acting in the best interest of the community and in his job as a maintainer, and his actions were exacerbated by the lack of clarity from Ruby Central. I don't know about the previous politics between Andre and Ruby Central when their orgs merged, but based on the comments from the other Ruby Central maintainers, I will always side with maintainers first.

busterarm

4 months ago

No, it won't because I can read the timelines and see what he's omitting.

He logged in and changed the password after the board emailed him and told him his services were terminated. That includes/specifically mentions his on-call services. His response claims only silence from the board and that he was just performing his on-call duties.

I've been a corporate stooge for 25 years or so now. On call duties are one of my main responsibilities. I would NEVER probe out which logins I still have access to after receiving notice of termination. He admits to doing this in multiple places.

All his justifications are that he was under contract to do work that he was already notified was terminated. Everything that follows either tells me that he has bad judgment, that he's lying (by omissions), or in the worst case totally delusional.

If he was so worried about operational takeover, why did he _change a password_ without notifying anyone else with operational capabilities that he was doing so? Nobody reasonable would _ever_ do that. There's a certain amount of upfront communication and CYA required of reasonable actors in this space and he doesn't have it (Not that Ruby Central did any better).

So no, I won't be changing my mind, and I don't know why you put "(again)" in there.

florkbork

4 months ago

Notice how this was taking over a GitHub repository from an entire team of maintainers, through deceit; and now we are all a few weeks in and you have seemingly accepted the narrative that this is now one bad apple justifies every action taken before and since, with no questions answered, with a wave of inconsistencies (it's about the money/no, the treasurer is wrong it's not about the money!), etc.

But the infrastructure, to have passwords to it, for rubygems.org, has been Ruby Central since the beginning of rubygems.org without any break. I don't know why people receiving checks from Ruby Central as contractors would think they had a personal right above Ruby Central to the infrastructure that Ruby Central has been running since long before they received those checks. Them thinking they did is sketchy.

Again, the open source source code, I agree, is another matter with other considerations. It has had many maintainers and contributors over time, including periods where development was not coordinated by Ruby Central. And all the code is owned by it's authors, and licensed MIT-style. But you're talking about passwords to infrastructure...

the_hangman

4 months ago

Genuine question: how do you take something which you have already been paying for?

They removed other maintainers access to their AWS account, and one of them had allegedly taken a screenshot of the root password from a password manager and logged in a few hours later and changed the root password to lock the legal owners out. Most of the community has turned on the maintainer who did that, it was extremely childish behaviour.

re

4 months ago

> They removed other maintainers access to their AWS account, and one of them had allegedly taken a screenshot of the root password from a password manager

Inaccurate:

> Ruby Central also had not removed me as an “owner” of the Ruby Central GitHub Organization. They also had not rotated any of the credentials shared across the operational team using the RubyGems 1Password account.

> I believe Ruby Central confused themselves into thinking the “Ruby Central” 1Password account was used by operators, and they did revoke my access there. However, that 1Password account was not used by the open source team of RubyGems.org service operators. Instead, we used the “RubyGems” 1Password account, which was full of operational credentials. Ruby Central did not remove me from the “RubyGems” 1Password account, even as of today. https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/the-rubygems-security-inci...

Ruby Central didn't realize that they hadn't actually revoked any access to the previous maintainers (and that they didn't have the updated root AWS credentials) until two weeks later when André notified them.

shevy-java

4 months ago

They keep on using buzzwords. These Ruby central guys never maintained a single gem used by many people in their life. I have no idea what they are writing, but it feels as if AI is writing their statements. Even then it is of such a poor, repetitive quality that even AI may just accidentally write better "summaries". People lost all trust in Ruby Central - there is no way for them to win back trust here.

IMO it would be better to start from a clean slate; dissolve Ruby Central and bring back the community with a new policy, rules - but that's not going to happen. Ruby Central went the corporate way and that's it. It would just be ironic if, say in 10 years, gem.coop proves to be much more successful whereas Ruby Central still writes the same AI-generated text ("we care for the community even if everyone is now elsewhere already").

the_hangman

4 months ago

Afaik many of the people who were on board to help start gem.coop have stepped back after the recent controversies with Andre Arko, at this point I don’t think it will ever be anything more than a ruby gems mirror

florkbork

4 months ago

I sincerely doubt this without a source

pebble

4 months ago

Better Ruby core than Ruby Central but still leaves me wondering what the hell happened and slightly sours me on the whole ecosystem.

zer00eyz

4 months ago

I spend most of my time writing go (among other languages).

Candidly its decentralized nature when it comes to "packages" is one of its strengths. It does have downsides, and yes GitHub could be at issue at some point.

After this, after NPM compromises (left pad and more recently the supply chain attacks) why we arent seeing more community driven changes around decentralization and venturing is beyond me.

madeofpalk

4 months ago

4 months ago

Yes. At least Ruby was always strongly Japanese though. In Python European and Asian developers are overtly exploited, with U.S. corporations and their employed stooges holding the reins of power.

I'm considering switching to Erlang, which was developed at a corporation from the start and appears to be drama and cancel free.

linhns

4 months ago

Ericsson is drama free?

nxor

4 months ago

Or Europeans choose to work for US corporations. What am I missing? I know Europeans who only want to work for American companies.

JoshTriplett

4 months ago

4 months ago

This is only a win for Ruby Central. They haven't conceded anything and they've convinced Ruby Core to endorse them as the correct and true maintainers of RubyGems.

> While repository ownership has moved, Ruby Central will continue to share management and governance responsibilities for RubyGems and Bundler in close collaboration with the Ruby core team.

Andre has previously maintained that he owns a trademark on Bundler and he will enforce it against Ruby Central.

=> https://andre.arko.net/2025/09/25/bundler-belongs-to-the-rub...

So Ruby Central transfers "ownership" of Bundler to Ruby Core. Ruby Central gets to continue to maintain Bundler, and Ruby Core is stuck with the liability. If Andre wants to enforce his trademark, he now has to sue Japan-based Ruby Core and risk the bad optics of that.

damagednoob

4 months ago

>Andre has previously maintained that he owns a trademark on Bundler and he will enforce it against Ruby Central.

Well,

1. He's not fighting Ruby Central anymore, he'd be fighting the Ruby core team.

4 months ago

If you go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616729 you can fix it during a short window [2 hours?].

Add also at the bottom a short comment, so the other replies don't look wrong. Somethig like:

Edit: fixed can -> cannot

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

shevy-java

4 months ago

How so?

I think there are a gazillion questions left. But, I also agree that the future will tell, e. g. we'll have to see how popular gem.coop will become (if they become popular). And I also, despite my disagreements, think that it may have been better to solve installations of ruby projects from the get go, e. g. Rust + cargo. But I also see this as separate from a service such as rubygems.org (or whoever provides any infrastructure). The question of who develops functionality can be separate, I have no strong preference here. And, I also agree that having both bin/gem and bin/bundle is not good. There should be a unified API (or two - a simple one maintained by ruby core, and then people can build extra functionality into their own variants).

Sadly this all also may end up like this:

https://xkcd.com/927/

4 months ago

It seems like it stems from dislike of André

saghm

4 months ago

As best I've been able to understand it, a dislike of DHH led to the opportunity for those with a dislike of André to do all the stuff under discussion. I doubt we'll ever know the whole story, but in the absence of any of the additional context that some people claim exists (but haven't made public), this seems to be the most coherent explanation for what happened.

bl4kers

4 months ago

> So this whole thing stems from a dislike of DHH?

Not really. Shopify threatened to pull funding for them which set the whole thing in motion

tomnipotent

4 months ago

Which only had weight because Sidekiq pulled funding because Ruby Central wouldn't deplatform DHH.

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

blasphemers

4 months ago

Isn't rubygems distributed as part of Ruby

florkbork

4 months ago

No, no, no, this isn't the open source way at all! I can't believe you aren't getting it still!

Because I once installed your project, I need to:

- Take over all of the accounts/access you AND all of your friends/co-maintainers used in connection with it

- Tell you it was a mistake, give back access temporarily

- Do it again!

- Have one of my board members who happens to be the treasurer say it was about the $

- Make a straight to camera YouTube post Addressing The Concerns

- Make a first "continuing our series of transparency" blog post a week later, where I use a dense corporate laden dialect to claim it was for the betterment of all mankind and definitely not about the $; because I need you to understand Where We Are Now; What This Is and What This Isn't.

- Open a Google forms question submission box.

- Smear your reputation, because you had an idea once about tracking which packages go to which companies; so I'll insinuate that you want to read everyone's mail and snoop through their undergarments drawer. What's that? My actions affected much more than just you? Quiet now, we're reshaping the narrative to smear you.

- Answer no questions, explaining that we chose to give you a regular series of Friday updates; but also We Want to Move On from the back and forth but also in that same publication have another go at the smear, because it partially worked.

- Donate the project to my state library, to take some of the heat off of me

Isn't that so much easier than typing "git clone" and "git remote add"?

(I am consistently flummoxed that a handful of people here are buying this narrative; instead of as you point out... Just applying a smidgeon of critical analysis about the usage of tools that the majority of us must use day to day and coming to the conclusion you do. Instead of doing this or accepting this conclusion, there's a frothy passion it seems for Appeal to Authority/Argument from Authority where any excuse, flaw, etc on the part of the maintainers is used to justify the whole chain of events.

It seems like it hits 5-7 facts and people can no longer manage them in short term memory, go and look at more than what is presented to them by a single party, etc; so they just default to the easiest mental shortcut.

For some reason I keep falling into the trap that "people are more educated, capable of critical thinking, and have easier access to data than ever before in history"; which I rationally know is not true)

mcphage

4 months ago

> So this whole thing stems from a dislike of DHH?

I don't believe this has anything to do with DHH.

4 months ago

Right?

Why is there (seemingly) no public offer to former maintainers to rejoin, or acknowledgement of wrongdoing having been done as part of this? It's practically zero cost to do that; as the Ruby core team is (largely) not the party that inflicted harm.

Politeness? Conspiracy to have done this all along? Cultural differences around public vs private opinions? Something else?

What would we think if this wasn't a software project but a hijacked community bus, being passed from party to party, pretending nothing is untoward about the whole situation while the passengers are still aboard? "Oh good, the new bus drivers are politely accepting the keys from the hijackers; all is well!"?

Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1o8zz3e/comment/njywb... No discussion with maintainers

busterarm

4 months ago

4 months ago

Decentralization is not the answer to that though.

lelanthran

4 months ago

> The key question here is how exactly the supply chain attacks will be prevented

By using signed packages. Why is this even a question.

westurner

4 months ago

Can Gems be served from OCI Container/Artifact registries, which (also) already support signatures?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991636 :

> Native Containers are bare-metal host images as OCI Images which can be stored in OCI Container Registries (or Artifact registries because packages too). GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, GCP, and AWS all host OCI Container/Artifact Registries

So, packages there too would simplify.

Re: "RPM 6.0 Released with OpenPGP Improvements and Signature Checking by Default" (2025) and Sigstore and PyPI and SLSA.dev and key revocation transparency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354568

Nerdctl supports various snapshot, lazy start, and distributed cloud storage container stores: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270468

Ruby has:

  gem cert --build your@email.com 
  gem install gemname -P HighSecurity

And also for signatures now there's sigstore-ruby and Trusted Publishing.

sigstore-ruby: https://github.com/sigstore/sigstore-ruby

guides.rubygems.org/trusted-publishing: https://guides.rubygems.org/trusted-publishing/ :

> Trusted publishing is a mechanism for uploading gems to RubyGems.org without using long-lived secret credentials. [..]

> Trusted Publishing is a term for using OpenID Connect (OIDC) to exchange short-lived identity tokens between a trusted third-party service and RubyGems.org. This allows obtaining short-lived API tokens in an automated environment (such as CI) without having to store long-lived API tokens or username/password credentials.

ivan_gammel

4 months ago

binary132

4 months ago

Depending on your definition of “threat” I’d definitely consider it a threat vector already.

bananapub

4 months ago

go is comically un-distributed in practice:

- almost every package is hosted on GitHub and that url is baked in to consumers of those packages

- the go proxy: https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/what-the-go-proxy-has-been-...

cortesoft

4 months ago

Isn't this the same as ruby gems, then? You can use alternative sources in your Gemfile pretty easily.

zrail

4 months ago

Sort of.

Go packages have the source baked into the package name. It would be like needing to say `require "github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri"` rather than what we do today, `require "nokogiri"` and then if you want to change the source wrapping `gem "nokogiri"` in an alternate `source` block.

4 months ago

>Go has decentralized package hosting and it works reasonably well.

All go package imports are proxied via Google.

https://drewdevault.com/2022/05/25/Google-has-been-DDoSing-s...

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF

4 months ago

> (you can set GOPROXY=direct to fix this)

https://drewdevault.com/2021/08/06/goproxy-breaks-go.html

Not that defaults don't matter, just offering the extra detail. And, as the post goes on to explain, this change seems to cause its own set of dependency issues.

monooso

4 months ago

The Deno people recently released jsr.io, "a modern package registry for JavaScript and TypeScript."

I'm not familiar with the technical details, but at first glance it appears pretty centralised.

leleat

4 months ago

Technically, deno supports https imports as well

https://docs.deno.com/runtime/fundamentals/modules/#https-im...

ergocoder

4 months ago

Is this written by a spy from a hostile country?

Ruby already provides a vendored version of RubyGems and (more recently) Bundler so this seems appropriate. It also separates the "running a web service" which has guaranteed hosting costs, requires on-call, etc. from "running an open source CLI/library" which has no guaranteed costs.

ufmace

4 months ago

I did say that those aspects of Ruby would start to be painful at that scale, not that it was totally unusable. Clearly it's usable, and there's certainly less scale-able things than Ruby on Rails out there serving big production traffic today. But I wouldn't recommend switching an app that big in some other language over to Ruby, and at least as many companies have moved off of Rails monoliths when they outgrew them, like AirBnB for example.

notepad0x90

4 months ago

But would they still build with Ruby if they had to rewrite it today? It seems other commenters are saying they wouldn't. I wanted to see if it offered anything more than my python and Go preference.

ignurant

4 months ago

For what it's worth, the last few years our we've sliced off a few custom client apps in Rails and it's felt like a great tailwind. We've been running a profitable BI app for around 15 years, but it's really hard to maintain. The dev team decided we want to rewrite it from .NET, Python, React into vanilla full-stack Rails. We were planning to rewrite it anyway to fix many old assumptions that turned out to be wrong and made maintenance a lot harder. It should also reduce the required coordination of backend API + frontend being that it's more cohesively developed together. But ultimately, we've enjoyed using an opinionated framework that has all the typical "web app" things batteries included and well-established. It helps discovery.

I think it works well for SaaS type offerings where you have a low number of high-value clients. We don't do high-traffic public sites. Perhaps my opinion would be different then.

gls2ro

4 months ago

Let me ask you a different question:

Would they be where they are today if there weren't been built at that moment with Ruby?

Both these questions are hard to answer without connecting the dots, looking backward.

Github was started in 2007, Shopify in 2006, Gitlab in 2011, Whop in 2021

It takes a long time approximately for a company to get out of the medium zone and go really big. So the only answer for this is we don't really know.

For any programming language you can find similar stories.

I tried to answer this question 6 years ago by analysing company data from YCombinator and TechStars: https://github.com/lucianghinda/programming-languages-in-sta...

Here is some data I found back then in 2019:

- Ruby companies raised 13 Billion dollars

- Python companies raised 11 billion dollars

- Java companies raised 1.5 billion dollars

- PHP companies raised 1.4 billion dollars

- Go companies raised 1.3 billion dollars

- Node.js companies raised 800 million dollars

Of course this data is 6 years old and it was based on the initial programming language and also it is about funding amount and not revenue.

I did not had time these days to update the data there.

notepad0x90

4 months ago

I don't know. Do programming languages really make that big of a difference, other than with developer unhappiness and talent scarcity when hiring?

I think how many quality devs you can hire with that language is really the only question that matters 90% of the time (ballparking), so long as the language is designed for that use case, like don't use assembly to write a production webapp.

I don't know many devs that code with Ruby, I know of more devs that code in rust and Go which are newer by at least a decade? so the question of what actual benefits it has is important.

For Go, it makes it hard to mess up error handling and easy to deploy your apps since it's all a static blob, but memory footprint and optimization can be challenging at times. For rust, it takes a long time to do things, so fast shipping timelines might not be a good fit. For Ruby, does it have anything that makes it more secure, faster to code with,resilient to failure, easier to scale,etc...? I don't think anyone answered that here.

What can it do _better_ that the other languages you listed can't or can't as well?

adamors

4 months ago

I’ve been writing Ruby profesionally for over a decade and while the writing has been on the wall for almost the entire time, it’s more certain than ever that Ruby is on its last legs.

Big legacy companies who have invested heavily into Ruby cannot switch but every shop I’ve been at often started new services in non-Ruby (mostly Go but have seen plenty of Node/TS as well or Rust for that matter).

If I were to start a new app Ruby would be far from my first choice and the biggest reason are types. After being in the weeds of big Rails apps while also working with Go/Ts/typed Python, Ruby seems very fragile in big codebases. Sorbet is also not enough.

kingnothing

4 months ago

I've used Ruby off and on since the hype train started with DHH's early videos showing how easily you can make a blog in Rails. Oof, that was published 20 years ago! I wouldn't use it for anything beyond simple shell scripts these days. You're better off with Go for back-end work.

shadowgovt

4 months ago

Was there ever a mirror of this dustup in the Linux distro community?

I'm unaware of one ever happening, and I'm wondering whether it's because of mere fortune or because there's something about the APT / dpkg model that precludes this kind of messiness.

Perhaps the Ruby community is suffering the curse of having lived with reliable Internet for so long they never had to solve the problem of building up automatic package mirrors? This just feels like a lot of words and energy burned on a problem that ought to be as simple as "Here's the package, here's its checksum, go to town."

zahlman

4 months ago

The fact that you speak of "the Linux distro community" but also "the APT / dpkg model" is already telling. Most distros — i.e., everything not derived from Debian — don't even use the same package format. A lot of the problem has been mitigated simply by letting people choose among competitive suites of alternatives.

That said, there's been quite a bit of drama lately in prominent Linux projects — notably bcachefs, X11 (and the fork XLibre), and the Omarchy distribution (even connected to the current story!).

shevy-java

4 months ago

There was - see old systemd discussions. For instance, how devuan was started.

It is not 1:1 comparable though. Ruby, python etc... have a much more varied community. People contribute code. Only few contribute to the linux kernel directly. There are many more who write "apps", so this could be comparable. Still it feels different to me, since a language community is different to a community that uses different programming languages.

> Perhaps the Ruby community is suffering the curse of having lived with reliable Internet for so long they never had to solve the problem of building up automatic package mirrors?

No, I think it is more that people never anticipated that corporations could take over projects. This has become more of a problem in the last years. Who controls github, for instance?

> This just feels like a lot of words and energy burned on a problem that ought to be as simple as "Here's the package, here's its checksum, go to town."

This is the issue of decentralized hosting versus top-down control. Ruby didn't have that problem in the past. It became more of an issue in the last some years. See DHH having an old tweet where he pointed out that he wants more control; I think this was from 2018. I don't remember it fully but it is on the ruby reddit.

busterarm

4 months ago

Ideologically-rooted dustups are popping off all across open source right now, it seems. Forks-included.

I've even seen unironic claims of certain pieces of technology containing "Hitler particles". That shook me a bit because that's an old in-joke and was always intended to be a joke...

shadowgovt

4 months ago

Who is the in-group for that in-joke?

busterarm

4 months ago

Leftists. It's a Trotsky quote.

elliotec

4 months ago

This is a fascinating and seemingly unusual development that will look obvious in history.

I find “BDFLs” and open source communities so incredibly interesting. Especially in the context of geopolitics and state entities. Linux!

This stuff is PHD material for sociology and polisci post-grads and I’m so interested in following the progression of history with these types of things.

shevy-java

4 months ago

I don't think BDFLs are a problem. Nobody questioned, say, guido design of python or matz' design of ruby as such. The issue here is primarily about who controls the ruby ecosystem. Interestingly python also had a somewhat similar discussion in the past; you can see this indirectly if you look at pypi:

https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2023-05-25-securing-pypi-with-2f...

See that question asked:

"Isn't supply chain security a corporate concern?"

He tries to bring arguments to invalidate that. And failed in an epic manner. Now people are more suspicious than before. Kind of strange to see, too.

zahlman

4 months ago

> Nobody questioned, say, guido design of python

Not up until the incident that motivated him to resign, anyway.

undecisive

4 months ago

Yeah, certainly tickles a few neurons.

I feel like BDFLs are akin to the concept of village elders; they're not immune to corruption or scandal, but they often have this beloved status that can paper over a lot of cracks. That's probably dependant on their leadership style - the hard headed (Linus, DHH) vs the grandfatherly (Matz, Van Rossum).

Which, going back to your note on geopolitics, leads me to wonder: Is it just that more power corrupts more, or is it that (modern-day definitions of) democracy require a desire for power? I guess as the "FL" part of "BDFL" comes to bite more of the communities, we'll see better how different succession styles have different effects. I also wonder if the analytical nature of the individuals within the "populations", and inability to police defectors will mean uprisings will be more successful, either in causing BDFL attitude adjustments, or just overturning the community completely (for example, there's already a lot of momentum for a complete fork of Rails)

(Edit: having submitted this, I now see others have had very similar thoughts! Definitely an excellent conversation topic)

TheCraiggers

4 months ago

> I feel like BDFLs are akin to the concept of village elders; they're not immune to corruption or scandal, but they often have this beloved status that can paper over a lot of cracks.

I think a lot of this is due to how so much is a scandal these days, for better and worse. (I'm obviously going to keep politics as much out of my response as possible.)

A few decades ago, people could have political views without ostracizing roughly 50% of the global population, or generally causing a ruckus at the holiday family dinner. (Obviously politics + holiday dinners has been an issue for a long time, but back then it was just something people tried to sweep under the rug. Now? Holiday dinners are getting cancelled or families are splitting up.)

It used to be that a scandal in the OSS community required you killing your wife (thinking back to ReiserFS). Now, a remark on Twitter is all it takes.

Again, I am absolutely not taking sides here. I'm just noticing a difference in the times, and agreeing that it is indeed interesting to watch.

undecisive

4 months ago

No, I agree. That said, I think a lot of that particular shift is down to a) increased individualism b) an emphasis on the healing power of personal boundaries and c) the rejection of unity as an overriding good.

People are far more happy to cling to the tribe they choose, and the tribe that has their back, over the tribe they were born to. Then, there are those who see that trend as dangerous to society (where, in many cases, society is really just a proxy for their own power or social status - ironically as viewed through their own chosen tribes more than the tribe they were born to)

That is to say, I don't think it's the political views that are splitting the families. Individuals have decided that care for each other should come secondary to those political views. I feel like there used to be a certain amount of care in the "sweeping under the rug" - it was the tribe against the world, it was protecting the family image as much as it was protecting the individual from society. These days, being a thing "in private" means being a thing alone, and that's no longer a compelling thought when external tribes are willing to embrace you.

Which probably applies to software tribes just as much as family ones.

zahlman

4 months ago

Clinging to tribes is the opposite of individualism, though, and represents pretty weak rejection of unity.

mrguyorama

4 months ago

>A few decades ago, people could have political views without ostracizing roughly 50% of the global population

This is ahistorical.

Not only was it the norm forever to ostracize entire sections of your society (protestant vs catholic and lots of other religions, black vs white, any form of non-hetero behavior, the Roma people and any form of outsider)

It often was the law

Americans shot their family members over whether we should own black people or not.

My french and white ancestors were expelled to Louisiana, intermarried with black people, and then when the US bought the french land, they introduced laws that made such families illegal.

Reagan made a hobby of publicly claiming his coworkers were communist. Thought that maybe we should be allowed to form unions? 100 years ago that was enough to get you investigated by the senate. Americans voted for him so hard the Democratic party is still floundering to have support. "We should allow unions" or "we should regulate companies" is still half-verbotten.

Do you know how many kids are still kicked out of their homes for the crime of being born gay?

This idea of "You used to be able to hold diverse opinions in public" is outright wrong. This past never existed.

Weird Christians in the US have tried to cancel things like Harry Potter and halloween for gods sake. They took a teacher to trial for teaching evolution. They made playing pen and paper RPGs a sin! When preachers molested kids, they shunned the kids

Being too chummy with another guy in public was a scandal! Being a woman who wanted an education was a scandal! Getting pregnant out of wedlock was a scandal that would tear apart families. Getting divorced was verbotten. Expressing support for social policy could get you fired, or murdered

Bush Jr literally said "You're either with us or against us" about supporting a criminal war and America pitched a globally public fit when other countries did not pledge allegiance.

gus_massa

4 months ago

> I find “BDFLs” and open source communities so incredibly interesting. Especially in the context of geopolitics and state entities. Linux!

The diference is that with an open source licence, the comunity can just fork the project (assuming they have enough developers), so the BDFL must master the art of herding cats.

A country has clear phisical borders and tanks, and people can't fork them and ignore the old power structure.

shadowgovt

4 months ago

I think you're absolutely right. We are starting to reach the age where a combination of large cooperative non-corporate tech projects and the Internet (that, partially at least, enabled them) are putting us in a place where the actual mortality of project owners matters. The "L" in BDFL is a finite constraint.

I think there's going to be an interesting and complicated churn as several major projects under the BDFL model have their Ds succeed at passing the torch, struggle to pass the torch, struggle to realize the torch needs to be passed, or take the torch and do their best to burn the whole project down so it can't outlive them.

poemxo

4 months ago

Does this potentially mean that RHEL will include more gems in their supported repos? It would be nice to script in Ruby instead of having to do everything in Python. Ruby is maybe my favorite language simply because of how it flows from left to right and how functional idioms come so naturally. But adding a gem sourced from community would be a hassle for my organization.

runjake

4 months ago

I think this is great news and the right move!

At the same time, I would like more information around how the Gem supply chain will be handled, particularly how Rubygems and Bundler will be protected against supply chain attacks, which are becoming endemic.

xbar

4 months ago

Thank you Matz.

https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover

drbragg

4 months ago

This isn't true according to this article: https://www.404media.co/how-ruby-went-off-the-rails/. Joel has a terrible habit of not citing his sources so I'm not sure if the post in question is the same but this seems to nullify that argument. TBF I do think there was pressure from Shopify to get compliance and security in order but saying "Shopify demanded that Ruby Central take full control of the RubyGems" is just plain not true.

mijoharas

4 months ago

The rubygems treasurer who is on the board said funding was conditional on doing this[0][1].

One interesting thing is that Ruby Central then said "Board decisions are independent and not contingent on funding."[2].

Doesn't inspire a lot of trust when there is a statement from a board member saying "we did this because of funding".

I'm more inclined to believe Joel's account.

[0] A deadline (which as far as I understand, we agreed to) loomed. Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going.

[1] https://apiguy.substack.com/p/a-board-members-perspective-of...

[2] https://rubycentral.org/news/our-stewardship-where-we-are-wh...

joeldrapper

4 months ago

Ruby Central is making legal threats to its critics, so I hope you can see why people don’t feel safe to come forward on the record.

I can tell you that two people with direct knowledge of the situation told me that Shopify demanded that Ruby Central take full control of the RubyGems GitHub organisation and packages.

You can believe that I am lying if you want. But I can’t directly cite my sources in this case.

drbragg

4 months ago

I never said you were lying. I said the quote that person pulled from your article isn't true. IIRC your article came out before the one I linked came out.

joeldrapper

4 months ago

I believe the quote pulled from my article is true. Freedom’s original article lines up with what other people told me. I know he’s tried to retract it, but I don’t trust him to be truthful in this matter. He has lied about other things like the takeover being necessary for security.

mijoharas

4 months ago

Oh no, looks like you're one of today's (unlucky) 10000[0]. (For context I only heard about all this recently).

For the DHH thing he wrote a recent blog post where he said he wants fewer non-white people in London and praises an english far-right fascist figure (Tommy Robinson)[1].

Not really sure about the Shopify stuff. I've heard people aren't too fond of Tobi (the C.E.O. I think), and he's buddies with DHH, but it could just be general distrust of a big company trying to exert control of an open source project (through Ruby Central).

[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/

[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

dontlaugh

4 months ago

As an outsider to Ruby I kept hearing rumours and thinking it has to be exaggerated.

No, it turns out DHH really wrote a blog post complaining not enough people in London are white (even though they’re British) and praising a famous British fascist.

The rest is very much still confusing, some kind of opportunistic power plays and typical open source chaos.

mijoharas

4 months ago

Almost exactly my thoughts when I heard about it[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303239

baggy_trough

4 months ago

[flagged]

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

tedchs

4 months ago

Is this announcement just about the gem and bundler packages themselves? I don't think Ruby core team is taking over the rubygems.org site right?

IshKebab

4 months ago

4 months ago

He's also in a bit of a unique situation because of his public political profile was essentially forced.

- Politics at work were becoming a huge problem at 37Signals

- They asked that politics be kept out of company chats, but encouraged people to be political active on non-work channels/social media/etc even during work hours

- People lost their minds at this incredibly reasonable request which then blew up on the internet

- They offered any employee 6 months severance if they weren't comfortable with the new policy. About 1/3 of the company took it.

- Rails Conf dis-invited the creator of Rails

- Obviously, this was not going to sit well as people were trying to create a very public political flex against DHH and at that point, he started getting much more vocal about the problem of politics sweeping into every aspect of life.

In the following years...

- DHH becomes very publicly outspoken against politics infecting everything

- 37 Signals publishes another successful book

- Ships much more quickly as all of the people constantly distracted by politics at work are no longer in the building

- Starts the Rails World conference to great success

- Rails Conf shuts down

- DHH ships Omarchy which is getting significant support

So the end result has been that a bunch of people tried to essentially "cancel" DHH and the result was him having virtually non-stop, resounding success while publicly speaking out against those who created the problem in the first place...because some people really do just want to build cool things regardless of your politics.

basisword

4 months ago

I disagree. DHH said no politics at work. I thought that was great. A sensible moderate position at a time where people were getting polarised.

Then he started a blog, built on his companies software, where he constantly shares extreme political opinions. When you are the public face of a company (and framework) and you are publishing your political opinions using your companies platform, you are now bringing politics to work. He’s a hypocrite.

brightball

4 months ago

That is the point though, his hand was forced. He was very politically attacked in a very public manner and has spoken out nonstop ever since.

zahlman

4 months ago

> When you are the public face of a company (and framework) and you are publishing your political opinions using your companies platform, you are now bringing politics to work.

So Tim Cook would be "bringing politics to work" by posting politics on Twitter from an iPhone? Plenty of prominent Python community members, including core devs, have politics on their blogs and also use Python-powered technology (dedicated SSGs like Nikola, but also even Sphinx which is really meant for documentation) to generate and publish pages; is that "bringing politics to work"?

itsnowandnever

it's completely unacceptable, and he's promoting a self proclaimed fascist white nationalist (Tommy Robinson)

zahlman

4 months ago

> I more or less agree with the "no politics at work" stance

> but you've omitted

I'm not that poster, but it was objectively correct to omit that, because it was as an objective matter of fact not "at work".

It does. Not. Matter. In this context what his beliefs are, or how they look to you through your lens.

In exactly the same way that, for example, the political views of GNOME and Xorg developers are not relevant to the development of those projects, and only become relevant when they get discussed in development spaces. (Or, you know, when they become the motivation for explicit interference in XLibre development.)

dash2

4 months ago

That's not quite accurate. Quoting chatGPT, since it may have more credible neutrality than my own opinion:

""" Does Tommy Robinson call himself a "fascist" or "white nationalist"?

No — Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) does not call himself a fascist or white nationalist. He consistently rejects those labels, describing himself instead as a patriot, free-speech activist, or anti-Islamist campaigner. To summarize the record:

* Public statements:

Robinson has said things like “I’m not a racist, I’m not a fascist — I’m a working-class lad from Luton who’s standing up for my country.” In interviews (e.g., BBC Panorama, ITV, and various YouTube appearances), he has explicitly denied being a fascist or white nationalist.

* Affiliations:

He co-founded the English Defence League (EDL), which has been widely described by journalists and researchers as far-right and anti-Muslim.

However, he left the EDL in 2013 saying it had become associated with racism and extremist elements he could no longer control. """

Maybe TR is a fascist or white nationalist, but he isn't a self-proclaimed one.

zahlman

I am also a (British, not American) liberal, and I agree with your comments about integration

the UK has an integration problem that successive political leaders have attempted to brush under the carpet, whilst ignoring the electorate's desire for a reduced rate of immigration

but the sort of nativist crassness displayed in that blog post is not the answer

and leads down a very nasty road that we thought we had defeated forever 60 years ago

> And the UK really seems to have a free speech problem. Support Palestine too much? Jail. Support immigration controls too much? Believe or not, jail.

I'm afraid this type of authoritarianism always seems to come with a labour government

BADBEEF

4 months ago

I am shocked, SHOCKED, to know that a person who loves to program and just wants to do it would be more productive than people bikeshedding about code of conduct and other matters ;)

itsnowandnever

4 months ago

he's definitely disingenuous, though. I think the "cancel" situation was cringe but the guy posts nativist musings about London and then acts apolitical. look, I get it. the first large generation of professional developers that came up in the web 2.0 era are getting older now so naturally many are becoming more conservative. but a lot of this comes across as some kind of backlash because these guys aren't "cool" anymore. there'd be a lot less drama in this situation in particular if DHH didn't act like he needs the approval of 26 year olds. they're never going to see eye to eye with him because he's an old man at this point so he should have some tact and be the bigger person if he cares about the dev community he was a part of. very similar situation to Musk who used to be adored around the world and now he's seen as a basket case.

ergocoder

4 months ago

DHH is at worst in the middle between left and right in the political spectrum.

Keeping politics out of work place is like an extremely mild stance.

For some reason, people label him as facist...

mijoharas

4 months ago

I don't think that's fair, I mostly thought that until I read his recent blog post[0] where he wished for fewer non-white people in London and praises a far-right fascist figure in England (Tommy Robinson, he was a member of the BNP[1] for while before he started the EDL which was more extreme).

When you're advocating for ethno-nationalism and praising fascists, I don't think you can get mad at people thinking maybe you're a little bit fascist, or can claim to be in the centre politically.

[0] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party

ergocoder

4 months ago

I read it and I don't see it.

He praised one policy from Tommy Robinson. This doesn't mean he support every single action performed by Tommy Robinson for eternity.

He advocates for stricter immigration laws and is against mass immigration.

He then praises the stricter immigration laws in Denmark. Then, Denmark would be considered facist and ethno-nationalistic by your logic?

> I don't think you can get mad at people thinking maybe you're a little bit fascist, or can claim to be in the centre politically

I'm actually mad that the word fascist is losing its meaning.

Wanting a stricter immigration law is now fascist, and Denmark is basically considered fascist for all these years for having stricter immigration laws praised by DHH...

At worst, this view is centered.

mijoharas

4 months ago

I disagree, wanting stricter immigration is not fascist, and isn't the problem I have with the article.

He argues that non-White people aren't British[0], that's the bit where it gets a bit fascist for me.

There's a debate to be had about immigration, that I think is valid. I think there's nothing wrong with advocating to reduce immigration. I think saying non-White people (who were born here, just so we can get away from the immigration side of things) aren't British is a dick move and kinda fascist.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45358344

Unfortunately this also has a few added problems now, because ... say that you are an indie dev or a solo dev. Would you want to "interact" with the ruby core team if they can just oust people at will if they feel they need more top-down control? Or, worse, if they only get money if companies pay them to do so? I am not necessarily saying there was a 1:1 connection with money in mind. For instance, the bin/gem was not designed by the ruby core team, in many ways was a mistake from the get go - see how Rust avoided this by having cargo. But one can not help but wonder how deep that money situation goes. u/jrochkind on reddit pointed that out, e. g. that there is very clearly a connection to ruby losing users and developers in the last ~5 years, and a dry-up of financial assets in general. I agree with him. Even if this was not the case here (though I somewhat suspect money had to do with many things here), the situation for ruby in general is really really bad. Perhaps matz felt that this was the only way forward, who knows. Either way it is not a good situation to be had.

It also shows how ruby is WAY too dependent on rails. If rails sinks, ruby sinks. That is BAD. DHH may contribute to this problem with the "I am the richest neo-boy in the USA" and odd blog entries (that's his though, he can write whatever he wants to), but the moment there is a financial interconnection is the moment there is no longer a fair field. And this is really bad, because it means ruby as such will be pulled by those who have money. Bye bye solo devs - you no longer have a place in the corporate infrastructure. And make no mistake about this: rubygems.org is a pure corporate entity now. Look at the new rules they forced onto everyone: https://blog.rubygems.org/2025/07/08/policies-live.html

This also reminds me of Pypi, by the way:

https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2023-05-25-securing-pypi-with-2f...

Quote:

"Isn't supply chain security a corporate concern?"

And then he weakly tries to say "no, it isn't because corporations finance us now, it is all about LOVE, HAPPINESS and THE COMMUNITY". But in reality - it absolutely is. Corporations wanted more guarantees and these inrastructure-maintainers said "that's ok - we don't pay these indie devs anything but now we force them into mandatory 2FA, ad-hoc 100.000 restrictions (can not remove your gem past that limit) and any other random crap, such as not paying them anything and having them work for us for free". I am sorry but there are soooooooo many things going wrong here - I totally agree with duckinator. This was a hostile take-over, unfortunately now we also know that it was decided from within ruby-core itself.

Note that I am not saying that it is a bad idea to have something such as gem maintained by the ruby core team, I totally understand the reason for this, and I also pointed at the example of rust/cargo. However had, the infrastructure shouldn't be a money-injection team for the ruby core team - the moment this happens is the moment things no longer work here. And ruby isn't merely the part designed by the core team; it also isn't just rails - you had many more people who contributed to ruby in the form of the ecosystem. Granted, many projects are abandoned (this is also a problem for rubygems.org by the way) but at the least this used to be true in the past.

In a way this is all a bit rubbish, because we see MIT/BSD licences, so people could just fork ruby (not that this is likely; I haven't seen anyone object to matz being an excellent language designer. I also don't think it is a problem if matz and the core team profit from this financially, that's perfectly fine. But the whole ecosystem shouldn't be in such a top-down control where corporations just buy their way into things, with DHH making snide remarks on his blog ("we got rid of the boys controlling the infrastructure now") all of the time while on Shopify's payroll - that is no longer a fair playing field here. Everyone can see this.)

Also, if matz made the decision weeks ago and told Hiroshi to do so, HOW was this fair to Mike McQuaid? The latter said he tried to act as man in the middle. But if the decision was made to finalize on this already prior to that, was Mike told that? If not, how is that fair? Either way I guess Mike gets the most praise from all sides simply for trying.

We'll see what happens, whether people love the new corporate-controlled rubygems.org or prefer gem.coop (which, admittedly, still have to deliver). I favour the latter, like the rising phoenix from the ashes - in part because I hated the new corporate rules that was installed onto rubygems.org, including the crap 100.000 download limit, but in part also because I feel that if gem.coop gets enough momentum overall, they can actually begin to solve NUMEROUS issues in the ruby ecosystem, from documentation to namespaced accounts (users and the ruby code as such, see duckinator's proposal) and so forth. Considering the damage shopify caused while wanting to control more of the ruby ecosystem, I expect them to now send more workers to go and improve rubygems.org as much as possible - and not ruin things in the process. Otherwise they would have only caused damage without any real gains.

The biggest loser in this are actually the folks at RubyCentral. Because ... what have they really ever done for the ruby community? Which high profile gems have they maintained? Just throwing fancy parties isn't going to cut it - Titanic was also sinking when it hit an iceberg. RubyCentral may still celebrate while sinking ...

gls2ro

4 months ago

4 months ago

> So what? NPM wasn't originally owned by Microsoft, nor GitHub, but reality moves forward?

NPM was a company and it was acquired and it was voluntary. I don't think you can compare it to this situation - this is more of a messy situation with everything open source collaborations, rather than having clear ownership in a single entity:

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/npm-is-joinin...

Or are you referring to the pre-2014 situation where NPM wasn't VC Funded, but in a more nebulous state? It didn't last that long.

joeldrapper

4 months ago

So it’s okay for Matz to get HSBT to steal people’s open source projects? What if Matz sponsors stole Ruby from him? WTF?

rich_kilmer

4 months ago

I was one of the originating authors of RubyGems along with Jim (RIP), Chad, David and Paul. I hosted RubyGems from my home for the entire community for many years. We never asked nor received anything for that. We wrote RubyGems for the Ruby community. Matz and the Ruby Core team is the right place for RubyGems. This is great news.

4 months ago

it paints all the stuff like is one person fault. omits to tell like stuff like

- gem.coop -> the person behind have a new tool rv that want to sell it

- they want to sell the rubygems logs to corporatins

- change the root pass at aws once they where remove from the project

small details like this.

jcmfernandes

4 months ago

Let's say all of that is true. Did or didn't RC perform a hostile takeover of the repos?

jaredcwhite

4 months ago

you're leaving out copious amounts of context here so sounds like you are obfuscating on purpose.

Mystery-Machine

4 months ago

Oh, I didn't know that André wants to sell gem.coop and/or rv. Can you please point me to more info about where this intention to sell gem.coop and/or rv was mentioned?

They want to sell some RubyGems logs about corporations (not individuals) using RubyGems API, to...Ruby Central?

As André explained on his site, he was on-call at the time when they were removing him. He acted to protect the service by limiting access. No harmful actions done by him were ever discovered by Ruby Central. It's two entities fighting to remove the other. You can say Ruby Central was right, I can say André was right. But we do know that Ruby Central fired the first shot when they (could've been an actual hacker) removed literally everyone from RubyGems and Bundler projects.

jaredcwhite

4 months ago

I'm sure you're not biased. I'm sure all the people applauding Ruby Central and Ruby Core right now aren't biased. /smh