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Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco
- Exuma 1y ago[flagged]
- ameliaquining 1y agoThis doesn't seem responsive to anything in the linked article.
- Exuma 1y ago[flagged]
- busterarm 1y ago[flagged]
- motbus3 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- busterarm 1y agoBe that as it may, they effectively entirely handed governance of Ruby Central over to a single party and manufactured a funding crisis that that party used to make drastic change. This directly damaged the entire Ruby community. Their dollars had influence that they could have used to steer the organization elsewhere, but instead they took their toys away and gave control to the very people they disagreed with.
- marcinzm 1y agoA system with a single failure point is inherently unstable. It's not a question of if it will fail but when it will fail.
- busterarm 1y agoThere wasn't a single failure point until Sidekiq pulled their funding, that's why Ruby Central's reaction to impending failure, as you said, was so extreme.
- marcinzm 1y agoSo not a single point of failure but the single action of Sidekiq's pulling funding was the cause... almost as if Sidekiq's funding was the single point of failure. If this is the reaction of the Ruby Community then no wonder they got themselves into this mess to begin with. Like deciding the intern should be fired for dropping prod and not the CTO who told everyone to use admin permissions for everything.
- motbus3 1y agoMaybe the lack of support from all other companies and people to the ruby foundation was the culprit. Sidekiq was help without obligation.
- echelon 1y agoI'm totally out of the loop. What did DHH do? Edit: I did a little googling and it sounds like he banned political speech at work? Is that the extent of it? His Wikipedia article doesn't say anything about controversy or racism.
- its-summertime 1y agohttps://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-problem https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
- felipemesquita 1y agoHe writes about controversial topics on his personal blog, and is on the right side of the political spectrum
- busterarm 1y ago[flagged]
- baggy_trough 1y agoThe most recent thing was saying there has been too much immigration to London, so various leftists are calling him a Nazi, fascist, white supremacist, etc.
- n3storm 1y agoFunny I searched in ecosia "DHH" and as spanish results DHH stands for "Dios Habla Hoy" -> "God Speaks Today"
- motbus3 1y agoPlease read his post on his blog to take your own conclusions, but as I and many other read it his post, basically non white people are incompatible with British culture and immigrants are solely a problem and serve only purpose to foster rape gangs and drug dealers.
- soupbowl 1y ago[flagged]
- marcinzm 1y ago"People aren't allowed to do what they want with their own money only what I want them to do with their money."
- threemux 1y agoWhere is this quote from? The person you're replying to didn't say that at all. They merely highlighted the fact that Perham attempted to punish RubyCentral for their "platforming" of DHH by pulling funding, but instead managed to consolidate power in the hands of those loyal to DHH. Had a bit of a Game of Thrones appeal which is I think why it has had such staying power on HN over the last week.
- its-summertime 1y agoWhy do you lay fault with the sponsor pulling funding, and not with the people who opted to have someone so controversial as a speaker, causing the sponsor to pull funding?
- busterarm 1y agoBecause we all have to get along regardless of what you believe and DHH hasn't advocated for violence against anyone. You can't unperson everyone disagreeable, especially relative to their contributions in the Rails community. Notice I said Rails community, not Ruby community. Not letting DHH speak at RailsConf is like barring the Pope from the Vatican. There are a lot of big new changes in Rails this year that he has been championing. He was absolutely the right person to give the keynote.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago> Because we all have to get along regardless of what you believe False. Freedom of association is a human right. And nobody is obligated to donate their money to a cause or organization they do not support. Refusing to associate with someone who would like to "Make Britain White Again" (among many other things) is a completely reasonable stance. https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-problem https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro... https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance People are free to say whatever they want. And others are free to respond in a variety of ways, including choosing to not provide support.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoThe paradox of intolerance doesn't kick in only after violence is advocated.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ccgreg 1y agoI've seen a Nobel Laureate disinvited from speaking at a conference due to an incredibly offensive statement. Toxic speech has consequences.
- 999900000999 1y ago[flagged]
- nenenejej 1y agoEdit: Decided to remove. Incase original article is wrong.
- bsnnkv 1y agoRemoved
- dangus 1y agoProgrammers need to grow up and dispense with this belief. They’d like to imagine a world where there’s no such thing as sales and marketing, where they can interact with humans and especially business manager types who tell them what to build as little as possible. So many developers seem to genuinely not understand why their contributions to software used by millions don’t magically generate income. If you’re a FOSS developer you need to grow up and do one of the following rather than moaning about not being paid: 1. Accept that you’re not getting paid and do the work as an exercise in personal growth and enjoyment. Don’t make it your job and don’t do burnout-inducing things like providing support for free. 2. Come up with a business model. Learn something about sales and marketing. E.g., nginx plus. 3. Get a corporate sponsor and deal with having a manager type telling you what to do and/or corporate employees steering the direction of your project.
- motbus3 1y agoI don't agree. You can have a good life from Open source. The problem is that people assumes the money that keeps rails and whatever going is guaranteed and that no one should contribute too because it is free. Sidekiq has all the right to remove the support for someone they find troublesome and can harm their image. Now if another company is able to take full control is because there were never anyone else doing that. It seems pure luck that Sidekiq never pushed their own coup themselves, probably they are just good guys.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
- its-summertime 1y agoThis seems to be mostly "I dislike Andre" and not really about the current events? I think a total of half a paragraph is about current events in any form.
- felipemesquita 1y agoWhile I agree, I think that was where Justin’s experience could contribute some nuance to the overall narrative.
- bradly 1y agoI got a similar feeling. The article’s title and closing paragraph reference not taking a side, but sandwiched between those are a lot of words that to me clearly indicate a “side” taken by the author. Through all this I will say that Ruby Central hired a non-technical director whose responsibilities I would expect to include communication and operational expertise to not let these situations happen or at least contain the volatility. That was a failure by Ruby Central regardless of the actions of engineers.
- dmurray 1y agoHe's explaining why he's not taking André Arko's side, which one can infer he's been asked to do. No one is expecting him to speak out in favour of Ruby Central's side, and he several times mentions how poorly they've executed and communicated whatever they're trying to do. And the complaints about that are well-known to anyone reading this post, and don't need to be rehashed. So no, I think he is indeed reserving judgment, but because of what he feels the need to emphasize given the narrative so far, it looks disproportionately critical of one side.
- bradly 1y agoHuh. I just don’t read that post and think, this is an unbiased take by someone reserving judgment.
- 1y ago
- renewiltord 1y agoI wonder if there's a term for this kind of thing where people use the word "including". As an example, I might have a non-profit that serves soup at soup kitchens and also pays me to manage it. If someone gives $100k, suppose I pay myself $90k and use $10k to serve soup. When someone threatens to cut the contribution, I say "This will affect the non-profit's mission since the $100k a year goes to critical things like all the soup served at kitchens". The impression is to imply that the majority of it goes to the soup. But the majority doesn't, in fact, go to the soup. It would be useful to have a concise term for this particular kind of deceitfulness.
- aeon_ai 1y agoSome languages, such as English, have a term for this - It's called "lying".
- rglover 1y agoFraud
- afandian 1y agoI know what you’re getting at. I think you’d call it a type of ‘lie of omission’. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lying_by_omission https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lying_by_omission But also with some elements of ‘category error’ https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Category_mistake https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Category_mistake
- renewiltord 1y agoI was thinking it's Lying by Omission but that seemed to not be specific enough to this specific style of omission. Ah well, it will have to suffice unless we can think of something sufficiently pithy.
- 4bpp 1y agoI've been seeing the term "hostage puppies" being used for this for a while now; apparently it is associated with esr, though he himself disclaims credit (https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1891528290676199513 https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1891528290676199513). It may not be a perfect fit since per the tweet, the term does not entail that there is necessarily any deceit or confusion involved - under the hostage model, the soup kitchen may be quite open about pocketing 90% of the money, as long as the implication stands that there will be nobody to distribute the remaining 10% in soup if not for them. As for the deception/confusion aspect of it, I am not aware of a perfectly-fitting term, but Scott Alexander has been blindly groping other parts of that particular elephant for a while, e.g. in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen... and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-meaningless-arguments/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-mea.... There is a common thread in that you can effectively mess with people's reasoning by manipulating their category boundaries, and this is not something that we have worked out good defenses against. Is software piracy theft? Is a fund of which 10% go towards charitable causes being used for charity? Is a TV popsci presenter with a BA a scientist?, and so on.
- saghm 1y agoFrom the outside, I'd argue that the most neutral way to interpret all of this is to assume good faith and trust every statement that hasn't been explicitly disagreed with by another party. Between what I've read before this blog post and what the author says here, that would lead me to conclude that Andre had years of behaving unprofessionally to Ruby Central and at least on one occasion towards Shopify itself, and then recently when Shopify became the de facto only funding source of Ruby Central, they demanded that Ruby Central take over RubyGems and Bundler, and as part of that, Andre got removed. The lack of communication around it just makes it seem like they had every motivation to try to remove him specifically, and took quite drastic actions to do so, but for unstated reasons chose not to publicize this aspect of it. If this were actually what the stated intentions of the changes were, I might understand it, even if I felt that using financial pressure on a third-party organization to remove someone from a different organization was a bit heavy-handed. Without that, it's hard to feel like this new context changes things much; even if he deserved the outcome personally, making huge changes to infrastructure that a huge community relies on to remove him seems like something worthwhile to be transparent about, and it doesn't do much to raise the level of trust that their stewardship of the infrastructure will be handled responsibly. My opinion on this might change if the timeline of what happened were challenged in some meaningful way, but allusions to "details that would contradict fact-checks and timelines others have pieced together and published" isn't that. The only way to steel-man an argument that isn't stated is to assume infallibility, and that's just not reasonable to ask people to do.
- runjake 1y agoContext: Justin Searls is a “high profile” person in the Ruby and Rails community. He has a reputation for being a nice person and behaving in good faith. From a personal standpoint, I can easily take his words at face value. I’m also curious about the views of Aaron “tenderlove” Patterson, who has a similar reputation. Now that Justin has spoken out, maybe Aaron will take the opportunity to. Both tend to stay out of drama.
- davidcelis 1y agoSome additional context is that Justin Searls is close friends with people who are or have been on Rails Core and/or at Shopify. I've long been a fan of Justin's work, and I've spent time with him at conferences so I can attest to him being a nice person in my experience… But, given the alleged parties at play here, it's hard to take this piece as unbiased when it lacks that disclosure
- baggy_trough 1y ago[flagged]
- hitekker 1y agoIt's an opinion piece by a trusted member of the community. He doesn't need to act unbiased but be credible and informative. As he wrote in his disclosure: > People whose livelihood depends on the health of the Ruby ecosystem deserve more information than they're getting, especially now that its operational stability has come under threat. On this count, Searls' article has done the work. I didn't know that Andre Arko baselessly threatened Google with lawyers, or that Andre played fast-and-loose with people's donations. That information was excluded from "unbiased" analyses and fact-checks which seem to largely target Andre's enemies.
- wgjordan 1y agoThe problem is not that Searls has opinions, it's that this petty hit piece against Andre was heavily wrapped in neutral, 'all I can do is offer a little bit of context', 'I'm not rushing to take sides' framing language, resulting in a disingenuous, passive-aggressive tone. Why is Justin dredging up that one time eight years ago when Andre mistakenly called out a repo for infringing upon his employer's work (for which he publicly apologized five hours later)? Why is he harping on anecdotes from nine years ago in order to suggest Andre may have allegedly (gasp) expensed technology purchases and business meals to his employer? What does this all have to do with the current situation, other than unnecessarily stir the pot with a laundry list of old petty grievances fed to him by a bunch of anonymous contacts ('a lot of different people told me a lot of concerning stories')? I think the author's close ties to Rails Core / Shopify employees is extremely important context for this post, especially since it's context that's been intentionally hidden by a neutral, unbiased framing.
- damagednoob 1y agoSeems like a few old scores are being settled during this drama. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people on the side of RubyGems are avoiding commenting in case any legal disputes play out.
- hn8726 1y agoI'm sorry but the article seems pretty biased, and doesn't really give any argument for why what happened would be in any way justified. Author keeps adding their own interpretation to Github comments and events, which — just by looking at the contents — are needlessly negative. For example [1] where commit message states > We've been continuing to backport bugfixs to the 1.7.x series just for Heroku, but unless Heroku joins Ruby Together I don't have enough time available to make sure that continues to happen. but OP claims it > was interpreted as leveraging his control over Bundler as a pay-to-play scheme I'm sorry but not supporting outdated versions of an open-source tool for a business is perfectly reasonable. Similarly, [2] was again is described as "was interpreted at the time as indicating the feature would be withheld from Bundler because Heroku had failed to pay Ruby Together.". This is not at all how I read it — the comment just says that the open source project has priorities and not all of them can be implemented given the level of funding it has. These are just two examples, but the article is riddled with wording like "blatant copying", "brazenly hypocritical", "was interpreted as [a bad thing]" etc. I just feel like reading a clearly lopsided political piece intended to incite negative emotions towards something/someone. There are just enough facts to make it sound fact-based, but enough of author's own feelings and interpretation that I'm not at all convinced. In fact, towards the end the author even states that there's been ~6 years where nothing of note happened, before the current drama. That seems like a relatively healthy situation? [1] https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby/pull/385/commits/6b3f3c71f4a98309e29748132be8e84b41d890de https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby/pull/385/com... [2] https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/1811#issuecomment-270788204 https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/1811#issuecommen...
- GreenWatermelon 1y agoI felt the exact same as you while reading the article. I started reading with an open mind, got a bit confused by the "dongle" joke, which the author doesn't remember but somehow it should be inappropriate. It's equivalent to saying "I think he said something bad 10 years ago but I'm bit really sure" Then there's the part about "leverage control" to extort heroku, which was a blatant misrepresentation of events and shows a clear Agenda. Not taking sides my ass. I can only conclude the author's reputation, as being ine of the nicest persons in the community, was earned through similar manipulation. And since the entire article is a "take my word" type of story, the blatant bias already displayed casta a shadow of doubt over the veracity of any other claims it makes, leading me to conclude the opposite: André is actually a nice and likable person, and has good principles.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoVarious related context: Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348390 Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45299170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45299170 A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45325792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45325792 I'm leaving Ruby Central https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352432 Bundler Belongs to the Ruby Community https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371061
- CodeWriter23 1y agoFirst OpenAI, then WordPress and now this. I think we are learning there is a point where VCs using open source become allergic to it. My only suggested solution at this point is to be honest about it. Because only then can solutions emerge.
- duxup 1y agoI feel like very little of that post actually addresses what occurred. Granted that happens when folks take a form of "don't want to get into it". Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the whole blog entry means anything then.
- BrenBarn 1y agoThis is tangential to the main point of the article, but the anecdote about the dongle is interesting to me. The author's point seems to be that it was disturbing that Andre joked that being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) was no big deal. It seems to me there are three potential aspects to this: 1. Being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) 2. Joking about how that is no big deal 3. Not being transparent about whether your nonprofit blithely funds stuff like a new dongle (and/or meals) From my perspective #3 is definitely an issue, and I can see how #2 could be annoying, but #1 is not really an issue at all, and it's not clear to me whether it's an issue for the author of this article. It's not much of a stretch from "programmers working on open source tools deserve to earn an income that's commensurate with what salaried engineers earn at the companies who benefit from those tools" to "programmers working on open source tools deserve a level of overall employment benefits commensurate with etc.". For-profit companies routinely pay for dongles like it ain't no thang, toss money around left and right on meals (even with questionable justification), and so on and so forth. And in fact the people who benefit from this reimbursement do joke about how it's "free" to them, etc. In this context, being reimbursed for dongles and meals seems only another form of leveling the playing field. Now of course, if people think they're donating only to pay a salary, and it turns out they're paying for meals, that's a problem (#3 in my list above). But if a person is up-front about saying "you're paying to equalize the overall compensation situation between the people who write open-source software and the people who use it", I don't think anyone should be surprised that that person expects to be reimbursed for dongles and meals. I'm not sure whether that was the case here, but, well, it's just something that stood out to me in the article.
- em-bee 1y agoi don't think #3 should be an issue either. buying a new dongle is a business expense. which means it should be paid from an account that is not taxed for those expenses, which i think is easier if you don't pay it from your salary. that's what i do with my company too. the extend that he benefits from that is effectively an increase in compensation, and so the only remaining question is, is the compensation fair or not.
- jujube3 1y agoThere's an awful lot of dongle-related drama in Ruby these days.
- GreenWatermelon 1y agoSuch a blatantly biased and dishonest article. In addition to what others said about TFA, This part jumped out to me: > Specifically, I was sent this commit replacing references to Homebrew from late July. As evidence of Homebrew's authorship was being erased and obscured, no additional acknowledgement was added to credit Homebrew for having created and maintained Portable Ruby since 2016. A paragraph later the author writes > In fairness to Andre, the rv-ruby repo continues to retain a copy of Homebrew's LICENSE.txt which names "Homebrew contributors" as the copyright holder. Andre also later added an explicit acknowledgement to the README, but that attribution came more than a month later, and (I'm told) only after he was directly asked to credit the original project. "In fairness" my ass. How can the author leverage a claim of authorship being erased, when the license is sitting there, untouched, for over a year? And when someone told Andre to credit the original project... He simply did? Seemingly without any issues. In what universe is this an example of "obscuring authorship"? Of course, putting this section right after the section where Andre mistakingly accused google of copying code without perserving the original license, leads you to think Andre is a hypocrite, when in fact there were over 7 years between the two "events". The storytelling is doubly dishonest because as Andre kept the original license intact, rendering all implicit claims of hypocrisy void. In short, this article is borderline defamation.
- lamontcg 1y agoAlso: > In August 2025, and seemingly out of nowhere, someone pointed me to the project spinel-coop/rv-ruby, an apparent fork of homebrew/homebrew-portable-ruby. I say "apparent", because rather than using GitHub's fork button—which would have maintained clear attribution of who created the upstream project—it looks like it was instead cloned and re-pushed by Andre. GitHub has long had problems with forked repos being half broken compared to the original repo. Used to be that you couldn't search within forked repos, at the very least. I'd actually consider it best practice to push to a new repo if you were entirely taking over a project and weren't going to be pushing upstream. I haven't extensively researched if GH has managed to eliminate all the reduced features of forks, but after something like 15 years of using it (proabably about the same amount of time Andre has), I would reflexively establish a fresh main repo if I was setting up a project and I wouldn't fork. This isn't really evidence of anything other than the author of the blog post looking to spin a narrative.
- jrflowers 1y agoI love this article because “I am completely neutral on this topic, anyway totally unrelated I met a guy once and kind of thought he was a dick, here is a decade+ worth of stories and rumors about him that I’ve had catalogued and ready to go” is a genuinely hilarious format for a post. It is so catty, like the dude could’ve just wrote “fuck that Andre guy. Choke on deez nuts!” and it would have the same amount of information value about whatever is going on with Ruby. 10/10 I thoroughly enjoyed that the author saw some confusion about the structure of Ruby and thought “Time to bust out The Many Crimes of Andre.xlsx”
- ksec 1y agoCan I donate somewhere to have the whole RubyGems going to Japan Ruby Core and Ruby Association rather than Ruby central? Makes things simpler. Less Drama.