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The broad-strokes story is: * DHH said some things on his blog that some people believe to be deeply racist / fascist (not going to unpack whether they were or

The broad-strokes story is: * DHH said some things on his blog that some people believe to be deeply racist / fascist (not going to unpack whether they were or not because answering that question is irrelevant to the fact pattern; consult other threads for that debate). * A Ruby conference run by Ruby Central was asked to deplatform him. Since he's the creator of Rails, they declined. * In response to their decision, a major sponsor (Sidekiq) pulled out of supporting the conference and Ruby Central in general, to the tune of $250k a year. * This created a "blood in the water" situation where Shopify hit Ruby Central with an ultimatum: they would back-fill the lost sponsorship for oversight control of Ruby Central (and the gem repository they maintain, rubygems.org). And if Ruby Central didn't take the deal, Shopify was going to pull their funding also, leaving them in dire straits (this, BTW, is a fairly common corporate tactic when multiple partners share support of a service that doesn't independently generate revenue. Look for it in your own business, startup company, and nonprofit dealings!). * Shopify now de-facto controls rubygems.org and people immediately started backing towards the exits because corporate takeover tends to be a harbinger of enshittification. As if to prove the point, Shopify's folks immediately ham-fisted the access controls, yanking several gem creators from the admin roles of the gems they created. They claim this was a mistake; several in the community do not want to give them a benefit of the doubt they are not believed to have earned. * Community members are standing up gem.coop as an alternative gem repository.

neya 1y ago
Thanks, that was a superb summary! Appreciate it.
ameliaquining 1y ago
This is missing an important part of the story that makes the Ruby Central side look relatively better, which is that one of the existing maintainers offered to help fill the funding gap in exchange for being allowed to monetize the server logs. https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-event-september-2025/#why-did-ruby-central-treat-this-event-as-a-security-incident https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-ev...
- brigandish 1y ago
  That puts the gem.coop repo in a new light.
- cyrnel 1y ago
  The response to that: https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/the-rubygems-security-incident/ https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/the-rubygems-security-inci...
  - ameliaquining 1y ago
    This is about a different part of the controversy, and doesn't respond to the allegation of a monetization proposal.
    - tehryanx 1y ago
      Yes it does. He's refuting that in this part of the post: > When they finally did reply, they seem to have developed some sort of theory that I was interested in “access to PII”, which is entirely false. I have no interest in any PII, commercially or otherwise. As my private email published by Ruby Central demonstrates, my entire proposal was based solely on company-level information, with no information about individuals included in any way. Here’s their response, over three days later.
      - bsammon 1y ago
        A very specific denial. "I didn't propose this specific type of monetization". Would be better if he followed up with "Yes, I proposed monetization, but what I had in mind was this more specific, benign form of monetization:"
- saghm 1y ago
  Your addition also misses an important part where the only reason he was able to do that was because the servers were forcibly taken from the previous owners for the ostensible purpose of security, but the new regime forgot to change the passwords as part of that. At this point, it's probable that any attempt to just list the pertinent events isn't going to end up being as neutral as one might hope because even the choice of what context to include or exclude is itself editorial. This is the same lesson people might learn in a high school history class, just applied to something much more recent.
shevy-java 1y 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.)
- thayne 1y 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 1y 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.
- nozzlegear 1y 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.
runjake 1y ago
It's news to me that the RubyCentral event had anything to do with DHH at least directly. You are alleging that Shopify was retaliating. Do you have any reliable context that Shopify was acting in a retaliatory manner?
- overfeed 1y ago
  I'm sure it's a total coincidence that Shopify (on whose board DHH sits) coincidentally became an active participant on toppling the maintainers soon after they criticized DHH. Given the power dynamics, the burden of proof is on Shopify to proove it wasn't retaliating at the behest of, or in a misguided attempt to defend DHH's honor.
  - runjake 1y 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.
    - basisword 1y ago
      Hacker News isn’t a court. Nobody has to provide evidence for any opinion they share.
      - runjake 1y ago
        They should provide evidence when they are leveling accusations against others. That's how a reasonable society works.
    - overfeed 1y ago
      Not only does one have to do the right thing, one has to be seen doing the right thing, because actual malfeasance and the appearance of malfeasance are indistinguishable on the outside. Though I wouldn't be surprised if Tobi/Shopify doesn't care for what the little people think, so this rule-of-thumb may not apply. Your second para is appeal to authority. A former CEO of mine (not a billionaire though, but a mere centimillionaire) was a drama magnet, thin-skinned, and a vengeful little shit.
kragen 1y ago
But Ruby Core is not the same thing as Ruby Central, apparently? This blog post says, "To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central. We will continue their development in close collaboration with Ruby Central and the broader community." What, if anything, is the relationshp between Ruby Core and gem.coop?
- ameliaquining 1y ago
  There is none. gem.coop is run by people who were previously involved with RubyGems and Bundler before they were ousted or resigned; AFAIK none of those people are part of Ruby Core.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Thank you for explaining!
mindcrash 1y ago
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 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 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 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-open-web/ 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 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.
- philipallstar 1y 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 1y 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.

neya 1y ago

Thanks, that was a superb summary! Appreciate it.

ameliaquining 1y ago

This is missing an important part of the story that makes the Ruby Central side look relatively better, which is that one of the existing maintainers offered to help fill the funding gap in exchange for being allowed to monetize the server logs. https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-event-september-2025/#why-did-ruby-central-treat-this-event-as-a-security-incident https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-ev...

brigandish 1y ago
That puts the gem.coop repo in a new light.
cyrnel 1y ago
The response to that: https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/the-rubygems-security-incident/ https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/the-rubygems-security-inci...
- ameliaquining 1y ago
  This is about a different part of the controversy, and doesn't respond to the allegation of a monetization proposal.
  - tehryanx 1y ago
    Yes it does. He's refuting that in this part of the post: > When they finally did reply, they seem to have developed some sort of theory that I was interested in “access to PII”, which is entirely false. I have no interest in any PII, commercially or otherwise. As my private email published by Ruby Central demonstrates, my entire proposal was based solely on company-level information, with no information about individuals included in any way. Here’s their response, over three days later.
    - bsammon 1y ago
      A very specific denial. "I didn't propose this specific type of monetization". Would be better if he followed up with "Yes, I proposed monetization, but what I had in mind was this more specific, benign form of monetization:"
saghm 1y ago
Your addition also misses an important part where the only reason he was able to do that was because the servers were forcibly taken from the previous owners for the ostensible purpose of security, but the new regime forgot to change the passwords as part of that. At this point, it's probable that any attempt to just list the pertinent events isn't going to end up being as neutral as one might hope because even the choice of what context to include or exclude is itself editorial. This is the same lesson people might learn in a high school history class, just applied to something much more recent.

shevy-java 1y 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.)

thayne 1y 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 1y 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.
nozzlegear 1y 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.

runjake 1y ago

It's news to me that the RubyCentral event had anything to do with DHH at least directly. You are alleging that Shopify was retaliating. Do you have any reliable context that Shopify was acting in a retaliatory manner?

overfeed 1y ago
I'm sure it's a total coincidence that Shopify (on whose board DHH sits) coincidentally became an active participant on toppling the maintainers soon after they criticized DHH. Given the power dynamics, the burden of proof is on Shopify to proove it wasn't retaliating at the behest of, or in a misguided attempt to defend DHH's honor.
- runjake 1y 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.
  - basisword 1y ago
    Hacker News isn’t a court. Nobody has to provide evidence for any opinion they share.
    - runjake 1y ago
      They should provide evidence when they are leveling accusations against others. That's how a reasonable society works.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    Not only does one have to do the right thing, one has to be seen doing the right thing, because actual malfeasance and the appearance of malfeasance are indistinguishable on the outside. Though I wouldn't be surprised if Tobi/Shopify doesn't care for what the little people think, so this rule-of-thumb may not apply. Your second para is appeal to authority. A former CEO of mine (not a billionaire though, but a mere centimillionaire) was a drama magnet, thin-skinned, and a vengeful little shit.

kragen 1y ago

But Ruby Core is not the same thing as Ruby Central, apparently? This blog post says, "To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central. We will continue their development in close collaboration with Ruby Central and the broader community." What, if anything, is the relationshp between Ruby Core and gem.coop?

ameliaquining 1y ago
There is none. gem.coop is run by people who were previously involved with RubyGems and Bundler before they were ousted or resigned; AFAIK none of those people are part of Ruby Core.
- kragen 1y ago
  Thank you for explaining!

mindcrash 1y ago

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 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 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 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-open-web/ 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 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.

philipallstar 1y 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 1y 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.