This topic seems to be in a holding pattern now. People are waiting to see how Ruby Central responds. Some are hoping for the Q&A to be rescheduled or at least another statement
blah, blah, strengthening governance, blah, blah
again, conflating code and rubygems.org service
anyway it's about "protecting the Ruby community"
Wow.
Wow, hadn't thought about that in a while. For a laugh, go back and take a look at some of the architectural choices they were replacing.
Can someone familiar with trademark law comment on this? If I understand this post correctly, there was a merger between Ruby Together and Ruby Central at some point in the past. The combined organization was paying for some combination of developer time and server costs for the project.
Can an individual member of this merger actually go register the trademark for the project name and claim that it belongs only to them after merging the organizations and working on the project together, including financial contributions? Is this a loophole situation where neglecting to register a trademark for the group organization left an opening for someone (who is a member of the combined organization) to come in and scoop the trademark registration for themself later? After a decade of the word being used generically by the community, can anyone suddenly trademark it and claim it wasn’t a generic term at this point? Have I misunderstood something about the order of events or nature of the merger?
But I don’t know if I agree with the title. It says bundler belongs to the ruby community. It should, certainly. But right now it belongs to the rich people who fund the work on Ruby and Rails. That’s DHH and Lutke (Shopify CEO).
Whether the community wrests control from them remains to be seen.
Do you mean "right now" as in _now that they hijacked the Github repositories and locked out the previous owners_, or "right now" as in _for some time now, since they've been funding some Ruby work_?
A true donation wouldn’t confer ownership, but in this case there are actual organizations and legal structures involved that did confer ownership.
https://andre.arko.net/2025/09/25/bundler-belongs-to-the-rub...
How does this manifest?
Companies are legal fictions that we allow to exist. The _people_ are the ones who did the development, management, and all the other things that had to be done.
The companies may have _paid their salaries to do so_ but there are plenty of open source communities that exist without the direct funding of work.
> there are plenty of open source communities that exist without the direct funding of work.
Great! Maybe the Ruby community can strive for this in the future but it does not reflect the OPs point that these companies and their outsized contributions via time and money are still core to the existing community we have today.
sure, but the issue is that one of these entities now demands exclusive use of something that should be shared between them and others.
saying that "this belongs to the community" doesn't mean that this entity is not part of the community, but that they don't get to exclusively own something that should be owned by everyone.
Arko registered the Bundler trademark to prevent this corporate capture and plans to give it to a new, truly community-governed organization.
The biggest risk is the loss of long-time maintainers and a resulting community split/forking of key infra. Total mess.
Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348390
Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45299170
A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45325792
I'm leaving Ruby Central
mijoharas•4mo ago
> I have registered my existing trademark on the Bundler project.
As all of this was happening I had wondered if there was going to be some kind of copyright dispute, but I guess it's gonna be trademark based.
Does anyone have any insights into how this might play out? How do trademark disputes tend to happen? (I assume this is in the US?)
jillesvangurp•4mo ago
Of course this is not guaranteed and just a common interpretation of trademark law by judges in trademark related cases. In case of conflicts, the trademark owner would be unlikely to win for this reason if a defendent can argue that the trademark was abandoned for years.
Oracle is in the same boat with Javascript. Technically they own the trademark. But world+dog has been using that trademark freely without them doing anything about it. So, their claims to the trademark are weak at this point. Hence the recent articles about e.g. Deno wanting to challenge their ownership of that trademark.
And you are right to call out the jurisdiction. Because interpretations and laws vary between countries and even between states inside the US. This stuff is complicated.
adgjlsfhk1•4mo ago
Aurornis•4mo ago
The community isn’t a legal entity. Saying that it’s owned by a public community with no boundaries or membership is equivalent to saying it’s genericized or abandoned.
Even if it was, that would undermine this trademark registration which was registered by a single individual.
em-bee•4mo ago
Aurornis•4mo ago
The person who wrote this post tried to register the trademark to prevent them from using it. If the trademark is determined to be abandoned and generic then they cannot stop Ruby Central from using it.
em-bee•4mo ago
if the trademark is determined to be generic, then ruby central can not prevent anyone from using it.
the goal is not to stop ruby central from using the trademark. the goal is to stop them from claiming ownership.
queenkjuul•4mo ago
type0•4mo ago
membership in github org is still a membership
Aurornis•4mo ago
bdcravens•4mo ago
petercooper•4mo ago
And, yet, it seems to still be difficult to do anything about it, with Deno now raising $200k to fight it. Ultimately, someone still needs deep enough pockets to push the point even if the legal point seems straightforward.
skywhopper•4mo ago
wgjordan•4mo ago
In this case, 'Bundler' still refers pretty clearly to a single brand-name utility within the Ruby ecosystem. However, the goods/services in the trademark registration application [1] covers "Downloadable computer software for managing, processing, optimizing, and organizing source code and dependencies", which is a broader class of services. The descriptive word "bundler" is quite widely used in the JavaScript ecosystem, for example, to describe this general type of dependency-management software (esbuild calls itself "An extremely fast bundler for the web", for example). I could certainly see the "Bundler" trademark being contested as a descriptive mark that hasn't acquired significant secondary meaning in that broader context, so it will be interesting to see whether this trademark application is upheld upon review (or potential opposition).
[1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=99407082&caseSearchType=U...