I think this is the right move. Thank you to Ruby Core and Matz for stepping up and providing stability to the language and community as a whole.

These projects were not Ruby Central’s in the first place. They were stolen for Ruby Central by a Ruby Core insider, HSBT. This is horrible news.

They were stolen from André Arko, Colby Swandale, David Rodríguez, Ellen, Josef Šimánek, Martin Emde and Samuel Giddins.

Is this without the consent of Ruby Central? Sounds like some kind of hostile takeover!

Edit: Seems like maybe a hostile take-back actually.

This is a fascinating and seemingly unusual development that will look obvious in history.

I find “BDFLs” and open source communities so incredibly interesting. Especially in the context of geopolitics and state entities. Linux!

This stuff is PHD material for sociology and polisci post-grads and I’m so interested in following the progression of history with these types of things.

Really appreciate Matz stepping up to take on this difficult situation. As a Japanese developer, I’ve been worried about the direction things were going, so it’s reassuring to see this.

In the long run, having multiple sources like gem.coop is probably a safer and more robust solution. But for RubyGems specifically, the trust was fully lost, through several layers - maintainers, community members, sponsors, etc. There's still open questions that probably need to be resolved like the funding and data privacy stuff, but I think most folks in ruby land will be supportive of this.

Decentralized package hosting is the only way.

So Ruby Central will still be running rubygems.org?

Ruby Central side: https://rubycentral.org/news/ruby-central-statement-on-rubyg...

As someone who spent a bunch of time talking before and after this all went down with current and past RubyGems maintainers, RubyCentral employees, Gem.coop maintainers and Ruby Core folks: this seems like the best outcome that was actually attainable.

I've been working on Homebrew for 16 years and leading it for some proportion of that and this all "smells" like a more sustainable long-term solution than anything we've seen happen in the last year. Some proposals sounded nicer but were not going to be acceptable to one or more sides.

Ruby already provides a vendored version of RubyGems and (more recently) Bundler so this seems appropriate. It also separates the "running a web service" which has guaranteed hosting costs, requires on-call, etc. from "running an open source CLI/library" which has no guaranteed costs.

It will be interesting to see what the Gem.coop folks do now (disclaimer: I helped them with their governance process). If there's some competition for rubygems.org as a server implementation that feels like a good thing for the community overall.

Good luck to all involved on all sides.

so we get namespaces for gems?

rubygems.org will still be operated by Ruby Central, though, so you still have to trust them. Given the state of affairs, this is less than ideal, but it’s probably a better outcome than nothing changing.

this is good and I hope this puts a lot of the drama in the rearview mirror. younger developers coming across Ruby must be like "wtf" about this situation. very peculiar to have these projects so politicised and I say that to the people that "try and keep politics out" (DHH) more than anyone. making your politics known and then being like "but you're not allowed to have an opinion on it" is't cute or clever. it's childish and everyone everywhere deserves to be treated with more respect than that.

Can anyone please explain this in simple terms for a relative outsider?

Thank you! I was hoping for this development! Now how about taking away rubygems.org from Shopify?

This is the only outcome that anyone who touches ruby can be upset with.

Better Ruby core than Ruby Central but still leaves me wondering what the hell happened and slightly sours me on the whole ecosystem.