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I still find it rather baffling that they just removed David Rodríguez outright without trying to work this out in advance. He did most of the work in recent t

I still find it rather baffling that they just removed David Rodríguez outright without trying to work this out in advance. He did most of the work in recent times. Seems like max damage approach.

mijoharas 1y ago
Has deivid spoken about any of this publicly yet? I was looking to see his take, but didn't find anything (other than some posts confirming that he'd had his access revoked too)
byroot 1y ago
They didn't. They initially left him as owner of the bundler gem after they removed 3 other owners, indicating they wanted for him to continue to be a maintainer. He posted on the rubygems slack that he left and is conditioning his return on all other maintainers being reinstated.
- baggy_trough 1y ago
  He said this on Slack earlier: "The immediate reason for this is simple: my commit access to the repository has been revoked, so I can no longer do the job anymore." Do you mean that he removed himself?
  - byroot 1y ago
    There are two different things, GitHub access, and gem ownership (permission to publish packages). Based on previous posts, they did revoke everyone GitHub access, but with the intent to give it back to some maintainers after they signed some sort of contributor agreement. However on the package publishing side, you can see that on Sept 20 3 people had access [0], hsbt, deivid and colby. If you compare to aug 24, there was also andre, sebgiddins and rubymorillo (no idea who that is). So that leads me to believe they had the intention to keep him, even more so because he was still contracting with them. AFAICT the intent was to remove accesses to former employees who left to start their own consultancy. So to me, that post from RC checks out, and I think they were very well aware of who was contributing what. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250920140646/https://rubygems.org/gems/bundler https://web.archive.org/web/20250920140646/https://rubygems.... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250824033341/https://rubygems.org/gems/bundler https://web.archive.org/web/20250824033341/https://rubygems.... Edit: answering myself on who rubymorillo was, it's someone who didn't commit in that gem since 2018: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits?author=rubymorillo https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits?author=rubymori... So yeah, permission management at Ruby Central did indeed seem to have been a huge mess. Not excusing the extremely poor rollout, but some cleanup was definitely overdue...
    - skywhopper 1y ago
      Have they ever explained why a contributor agreement is crucial? Will it assign copyright to RubyCentral?
      - byroot 1y ago
        Not to my knowledge. But I may have missed something. My understanding is that having a legally enforceable contract help dissuade malevolent actions (easier to sue for breach of contract? But IANAL). As for copyright attribution, I doubt it. That ship has sailed, that code base already contains contributions from hundreds of people, and I can’t really imagine a business model that would rely on relicensing.
    - justinclift 1y ago
      > they did revoke everyone GitHub access, but with the intent to give it back to some maintainers after they signed some sort of contributor agreement. That sounds like someone or some people spontaneously deciding they're going to become gatekeepers, without any kind of warning and/or Community discussion/agreement first. > Not excusing the extremely poor rollout, but some cleanup was definitely overdue... While true, what they should have done is discuss it with the maintainers _first_ and agree to a plan. Not just seize control, especially from active contributors. :(

I still find it rather baffling that they just removed David Rodríguez outright without trying to work this out in advance. He did most of the work in recent times. Seems like max damage approach.

mijoharas 1y ago

Has deivid spoken about any of this publicly yet? I was looking to see his take, but didn't find anything (other than some posts confirming that he'd had his access revoked too)

byroot 1y ago

They didn't. They initially left him as owner of the bundler gem after they removed 3 other owners, indicating they wanted for him to continue to be a maintainer. He posted on the rubygems slack that he left and is conditioning his return on all other maintainers being reinstated.

baggy_trough 1y ago
He said this on Slack earlier: "The immediate reason for this is simple: my commit access to the repository has been revoked, so I can no longer do the job anymore." Do you mean that he removed himself?
- byroot 1y ago
  There are two different things, GitHub access, and gem ownership (permission to publish packages). Based on previous posts, they did revoke everyone GitHub access, but with the intent to give it back to some maintainers after they signed some sort of contributor agreement. However on the package publishing side, you can see that on Sept 20 3 people had access [0], hsbt, deivid and colby. If you compare to aug 24, there was also andre, sebgiddins and rubymorillo (no idea who that is). So that leads me to believe they had the intention to keep him, even more so because he was still contracting with them. AFAICT the intent was to remove accesses to former employees who left to start their own consultancy. So to me, that post from RC checks out, and I think they were very well aware of who was contributing what. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250920140646/https://rubygems.org/gems/bundler https://web.archive.org/web/20250920140646/https://rubygems.... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250824033341/https://rubygems.org/gems/bundler https://web.archive.org/web/20250824033341/https://rubygems.... Edit: answering myself on who rubymorillo was, it's someone who didn't commit in that gem since 2018: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits?author=rubymorillo https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits?author=rubymori... So yeah, permission management at Ruby Central did indeed seem to have been a huge mess. Not excusing the extremely poor rollout, but some cleanup was definitely overdue...
  - skywhopper 1y ago
    Have they ever explained why a contributor agreement is crucial? Will it assign copyright to RubyCentral?
    - byroot 1y ago
      Not to my knowledge. But I may have missed something. My understanding is that having a legally enforceable contract help dissuade malevolent actions (easier to sue for breach of contract? But IANAL). As for copyright attribution, I doubt it. That ship has sailed, that code base already contains contributions from hundreds of people, and I can’t really imagine a business model that would rely on relicensing.
  - justinclift 1y ago
    > they did revoke everyone GitHub access, but with the intent to give it back to some maintainers after they signed some sort of contributor agreement. That sounds like someone or some people spontaneously deciding they're going to become gatekeepers, without any kind of warning and/or Community discussion/agreement first. > Not excusing the extremely poor rollout, but some cleanup was definitely overdue... While true, what they should have done is discuss it with the maintainers _first_ and agree to a plan. Not just seize control, especially from active contributors. :(