5 ms·

Not a rubyist so just curious on the background and if this is the “good” or the “bad” side in the spat? What’s the other side and what has been the broader co

Not a rubyist so just curious on the background and if this is the “good” or the “bad” side in the spat? What’s the other side and what has been the broader community impact?

jmcgough 7mo ago
https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/ https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/ Read the above, but tl;dr is that Shopify executed a hostile takeover of Ruby Central for its own benefit, at the expense of long-term maintainers and the general community. I'm not sure if there's been any real change since then, but there are many reasons not to trust anything that the board says at this point.
- windowshopping 7mo ago
  Wait, I had no idea dhh was on the outs now. This is the first I've heard of this. I have to go look for more information about this. What did he do?
  - tovej 7mo ago
    He came out as a white nationalist [1]. And he's always been contentious. [1] https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thought/ https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
    - SoleilAbsolu 7mo ago
      If MINASWAN... WTFIDHHSAFA???
  - fcsp 7mo ago
    I would recommend as a starting point this beautiful piece from November: https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
  - jmcgough 7mo ago
    Not sure he's "on the outs", he on Shopify's board. Sidekiq's solo dev (Mike Perham) has for many years made a generous donation to Ruby Central. He informed them that he didn't want his money to be spent platforming dhh at their conference, they ignored his request, he stopped his annual donations. If you want to read about dhh's colorful blog posts and tweets: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thought/ https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
    - mtndew4brkfst 7mo ago
      Colorful is an odd way to spell "vocally bigoted".
      - jmcgough 7mo ago
        I get downvoted here when I call him a racist.
        angoragoats 7mo ago
        Me too, and because of that I feel it's even more important to use language like racist, white nationalist, and fascist when describing him and his ilk, because that's what they are. Softening the language only leads to those beliefs becoming more normalized than they already are.
  - angoragoats 7mo ago
    If you’d like to read, in his own words, his “coming out” as an ultra right wing racist piece of shit, feel free to look on his blog for the post titled “As I Remember London.”
- Kina 7mo ago
  IMHO, Ruby Central keeps trying to find a way to frame all of this in a good light, but it seems like they keep falling flat. They tried doing filtered Q&A avoiding all the obvious questions that people hostile to what happened would ask, temporarily providing transparency reports that didn’t really say much. It all felt like very incompetent damage control. I think they were hoping that handing it off to the Ruby core team would allow them to move on, but that requires ownership of their failings or at least actions that demonstrate that they will be better moving forward and none of that has happened.
mpalmer 7mo ago
Shopify and/or its technical leadership worked its connections to oust a Rubygems maintainer they saw as a threat to Ruby projects Shopify has invested in. This was especially provocative because it involved Ruby Central asserting control over Rubygems, which it does not own. It was (by credible accounts) a "preemptive strike" on this maintainer, and thus was not communicated to other RG maintainers, who were understandably angry. The statement from RC at the time sounded like lot of CYA, and this doesn't read as all that sincere either.
- joeldrapper 7mo ago
  That’s what it looks like to me, but I haven’t yet seen a good explanation of their motive. Why would the development of `rv` be such a threat to them? I know specific individuals hate Andre and have had beef with him for years, but it’s hard to see what might have motivated Shopify and specifically Ufuk Kayserilioglu to carry this out.
  - mpalmer 7mo ago
    > Why would the development of `rv` be such a threat to them? Well, package managers and language bundlers/runtimes are the hottest new luxury item for big tech - maybe they're worried rv gets bought in the same way that Anthropic bought bun, and OpenAI bought uv (Astral). Though at the time, none of that had happened yet.
Kina 7mo ago
From what I can tell, this story is primarily about personalities. The community essentially ended up with several factions, but I’ll try to explain this without it degenerating into the schoolyard fighting that it appears to be. 1. Ruby Central is the surviving Ruby non-profit that another Ruby non-profit, Ruby Together merged with. This is where part of the legal ambiguity/dispute comes from that will make sense in (2). 2. RubyGems (the code, GitHub repo, etc) and RubyGems.org are two separate things. RubyGems code appears to not have been legally transferred in the merger. RubyGems.org is run by Ruby Central, but this transfer is also extremely muddy. 3. For reasons in dispute, Ruby Central seized the GitHub repos of RubyGems. It is not clear they have the legal or ethical right to do this (based on the evidence, I believe they do not and they have committed theft). 4. Ruby Central has made various noises about the need to do this for security and other things despite the extremely sloppy nature of the takeover. 5. Ruby Central then “gave” RubyGems to the Ruby core team without resolving anything in what appears to be an attempt to try and end the controversy. In the background of all of this appears to be a lack of trust, dhh posting crap like this: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64, resulting in a fight about the future of the Ruby ecosystem.

Not a rubyist so just curious on the background and if this is the “good” or the “bad” side in the spat? What’s the other side and what has been the broader community impact?

jmcgough 7mo ago

https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/ https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/ Read the above, but tl;dr is that Shopify executed a hostile takeover of Ruby Central for its own benefit, at the expense of long-term maintainers and the general community. I'm not sure if there's been any real change since then, but there are many reasons not to trust anything that the board says at this point.

windowshopping 7mo ago
Wait, I had no idea dhh was on the outs now. This is the first I've heard of this. I have to go look for more information about this. What did he do?
- tovej 7mo ago
  He came out as a white nationalist [1]. And he's always been contentious. [1] https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thought/ https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
  - SoleilAbsolu 7mo ago
    If MINASWAN... WTFIDHHSAFA???
- fcsp 7mo ago
  I would recommend as a starting point this beautiful piece from November: https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
- jmcgough 7mo ago
  Not sure he's "on the outs", he on Shopify's board. Sidekiq's solo dev (Mike Perham) has for many years made a generous donation to Ruby Central. He informed them that he didn't want his money to be spent platforming dhh at their conference, they ignored his request, he stopped his annual donations. If you want to read about dhh's colorful blog posts and tweets: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thought/ https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
  - mtndew4brkfst 7mo ago
    Colorful is an odd way to spell "vocally bigoted".
    - jmcgough 7mo ago
      I get downvoted here when I call him a racist.
      - angoragoats 7mo ago
        Me too, and because of that I feel it's even more important to use language like racist, white nationalist, and fascist when describing him and his ilk, because that's what they are. Softening the language only leads to those beliefs becoming more normalized than they already are.
- angoragoats 7mo ago
  If you’d like to read, in his own words, his “coming out” as an ultra right wing racist piece of shit, feel free to look on his blog for the post titled “As I Remember London.”
Kina 7mo ago
IMHO, Ruby Central keeps trying to find a way to frame all of this in a good light, but it seems like they keep falling flat. They tried doing filtered Q&A avoiding all the obvious questions that people hostile to what happened would ask, temporarily providing transparency reports that didn’t really say much. It all felt like very incompetent damage control. I think they were hoping that handing it off to the Ruby core team would allow them to move on, but that requires ownership of their failings or at least actions that demonstrate that they will be better moving forward and none of that has happened.

mpalmer 7mo ago

Shopify and/or its technical leadership worked its connections to oust a Rubygems maintainer they saw as a threat to Ruby projects Shopify has invested in. This was especially provocative because it involved Ruby Central asserting control over Rubygems, which it does not own. It was (by credible accounts) a "preemptive strike" on this maintainer, and thus was not communicated to other RG maintainers, who were understandably angry. The statement from RC at the time sounded like lot of CYA, and this doesn't read as all that sincere either.

joeldrapper 7mo ago
That’s what it looks like to me, but I haven’t yet seen a good explanation of their motive. Why would the development of `rv` be such a threat to them? I know specific individuals hate Andre and have had beef with him for years, but it’s hard to see what might have motivated Shopify and specifically Ufuk Kayserilioglu to carry this out.
- mpalmer 7mo ago
  > Why would the development of `rv` be such a threat to them? Well, package managers and language bundlers/runtimes are the hottest new luxury item for big tech - maybe they're worried rv gets bought in the same way that Anthropic bought bun, and OpenAI bought uv (Astral). Though at the time, none of that had happened yet.

Kina 7mo ago

From what I can tell, this story is primarily about personalities. The community essentially ended up with several factions, but I’ll try to explain this without it degenerating into the schoolyard fighting that it appears to be. 1. Ruby Central is the surviving Ruby non-profit that another Ruby non-profit, Ruby Together merged with. This is where part of the legal ambiguity/dispute comes from that will make sense in (2). 2. RubyGems (the code, GitHub repo, etc) and RubyGems.org are two separate things. RubyGems code appears to not have been legally transferred in the merger. RubyGems.org is run by Ruby Central, but this transfer is also extremely muddy. 3. For reasons in dispute, Ruby Central seized the GitHub repos of RubyGems. It is not clear they have the legal or ethical right to do this (based on the evidence, I believe they do not and they have committed theft). 4. Ruby Central has made various noises about the need to do this for security and other things despite the extremely sloppy nature of the takeover. 5. Ruby Central then “gave” RubyGems to the Ruby core team without resolving anything in what appears to be an attempt to try and end the controversy. In the background of all of this appears to be a lack of trust, dhh posting crap like this: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64, resulting in a fight about the future of the Ruby ecosystem.