I have a hard time believing a company as large as Shopify or others using Ruby will take these actions without first consulting their legal departments. Maybe I'm wrong, but you have to cite an applicable law. Just saying something is lawless doesn't mean it actually is.

But...it makes it a little difficult to build an inclusive open source community with that at your head.

I distinctly remember a specific Twitter comment, maybe 7ish years ago, that solidified my view on DHH as a person. It was a thread about remote work. Someone from South America commented trying to be nice to David, saying something like "you should work remotely from Chile, it has a great Ruby community" etc, to which his response was "I've no interest in living in a 3rd world country".

Notch-esque politics aside, that was mean-spirited, inconsiderate behavior which should not be applauded. From that day I strongly sensed that was who he truly was.

https://pressprogress.ca/shopify-executives-right-wing-media...

https://disconnect.blog/the-conservative-tech-alliance-is-co...

But Shopify is also right wing in its executive team, and via these move they appear to be support DHH:

https://pressprogress.ca/shopify-executives-right-wing-media...

https://disconnect.blog/the-conservative-tech-alliance-is-co...

See: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

If you have the source code, you own the source code. Other people own it as well. This is literally the defining feature of open source. If I have Ruby source code and Rails source code on my machine, I own it, no one can take it away or tell me what to do with it.

Anyhow, Ruby Central managed the GitHub repo, the website, the gem, bundler, etc... before this.

If some disgruntled former employee/contractor wants to hard fork they can, they also own the code. But I heard they've started a competitor and are looking for funding (probably part of the reason Shopify and others wanted to consolidate control; a maintainer with admin privileges starting a literal competitor is a liability).

> In his blog post, André says, “For the last ten years or so of working on Bundler, I’ve had a wish rattling around: I want a better dependency manager. It doesn’t just manage your gems, it manages your ruby versions, too. It doesn’t just manage your ruby versions, it installs pre-compiled rubies so you don’t have to wait for ruby to compile from source every time. And more than all of that, it makes it completely trivial to run any script or tool written in ruby, even if that script or tool needs a different ruby than your application does.”

> Bluesky threads reveal that Rafael França (Shopify / Rails Core) saw this tool as a threat, saying “some of the “admins” even announced publicly many days ago they were launching a competitor tool [rv] and were funding raising for it. I’d not trust the system to such “admin”.”

So a dev was innovating to better tool to meet their needs (which is what most open source maintainers are generally doing all day), and then some guys immediately jumped to the possibility that they would then actively sabotage RubyGems? Whoa, that is insane.

Trying to kill innovation and a start-up out of fear doesn't sound like Shopify's branding in the media.