Discussion
A Message from the Ruby Central Board
wood_spirit: 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: https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
doug_durham: I don’t think there are “millions” of Ruby developers. It’s a large community but hyperbole doesn’t serve anyone.
mpalmer: 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.
Kina: 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, resulting in a fight about the future of the Ruby ecosystem.
