I don’t quite get how this happened? Ruby Central can’t just reach into my GitHub and declare they own something. Was it under the Ruby central account? Or an org account that decided they “own” the repo?
The cultural hegemony that blue team activists have enjoyed is over, and now those with actual power are finally asserting it and ousting all of the trouble-makers.
I'm happy to be proven wrong here, but I really need evidence rather than some highfalutin argument that rests on reasoning by analogy.
Edit: I see more downvotes than replies. I suspect I'm correct.
That's your take?
I simply observe lawlessness.
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.
This is kind of the problem. People parrot this stuff with no further investigation.
Personally, I think DHH is a troll and would never be interested in sponsoring, or attending, an event that involved him.
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.
Replace "nationalistic" with "fascist". That's the issue.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/07/michael-moorcoc...
https://www.shopify.com/news/david-heinemeier-hansson-board
Shopify's support for DHH's world view makes sense. Shopify's executive team has been right-wing for a while now:
https://pressprogress.ca/shopify-executives-right-wing-media...
https://disconnect.blog/the-conservative-tech-alliance-is-co...
Honest question: What's the issue with DHH here? What did he do that caused them to pull support because he was platformed at RailsConf?
https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
DHH has been going off the deep end with his rhetoric for years, the current political environment has made it so that he can't be ignored anymore.
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...
And yeah, Shopify is going to protect DHH because DHH is on Shopify's board:
Also, people opposing it (Sidekiq, the guys starting "rv", etc...) have a vested financial interest in opposing Rails and rubygems...
Not everyone who is not your skin color is a non-native, a criminal or an illegal immigrant by the way.
See: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
I couldn't understand this bit. Why does a Dane care about the ethnic makeup of London ? Is London worse off than the 90s and early 2000s ? He doesn't leave much to charitable interpretation…
It's not just about his politics. DHH is reactionary, mean, dismissive of others' opinions. He acts more like a high school bully than a leader.
Since then, DHH has gone off the deep end with xenophobic, racist, and transphobic comments. I was drawn to the Ruby community because of its kindness and creativity, with people like why the lucky stiff and Jim Weirich. It is a lot less welcoming when DHH repeatedly uses his platform to say that I shouldn't exist or have equal rights.
Can you point to any of his blog posts that says this ?
I follow him on Twitter and guy is a bully and has opinions about stuff he has 0 knowledge about.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-social-media-censorship-era-is...
I guess I’m so old that I remember not paying much attention to personal lives and looking at code contributions and collaboration behavior. I think that being a sensitive collaborator who builds changes was more relevant than swearing at people or saying rude things.
I once worked for a company where one developer hit another in the face with a keyboard. Was it wrong, yes of course. But we still delivered a pretty decent product.
I don’t really care if you, or others feel I should exist or not. Or whether they think I should or shouldn’t have rights, unless you mean permissions to change and maintain code.
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).
This is incorrect. The GitHub repository was managed by the maintainers, only some of whom were Ruby Central employees. RubyCentral decided to break the agreement under which those maintainers worked and take control of the repository.
Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45299170
A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
> 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 make 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.
An Update from Ruby Central - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45344448 - Sept 2025 (1 comment)
A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45325792 - Sept 2025 (148 comments)
Goodbye, RubyGems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306135 - Sept 2025 (1 comment)
Ruby Central's response to the RubyGems situation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45301949 - Sept 2025 (1 comment)
Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45299170 - Sept 2025 (244 comments)
I just wish we could get to the part where the community can know and trust that our supply chain is safe and can be trusted.
1. Ruby Central hosts, maintains, and sponsors Rubygems and Bundler
2. Based on recent events, it was possible that credentials were stolen (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/60-malicious-...)
3. They decided to lock everyone out until security issues could be resolved
It makes sense to me from a security standpoint, but their communication has been terrible which has led to a lot of speculation.
Ruby Central hosts the RubyGems service, not the RubyGems repository. Ruby Central employs some RubyGems maintainers but does not own the repository. Ruby Central decided to make their employees who are maintainers take over the repository against the wishes of the other maintainers so they could remove some of the maintainers from the project.
leakycap•2h ago
The Ruby community has been eating itself alive since almost the beginning, but it is sad to see the short-sighted destruction of trust and connection that this has had.
bradgessler•58m ago
leakycap•43m ago
Predating the current hostile takeover: •••the vitriol directed at early critics like Zed Shaw •••mysterious departure of _why the lucky stiff •••the contentious Code of Conduct •••DHH •••uneasy truce after the toxic tribalism of the Rails vs. Merb
There's more, but the linked article can send you down more interesting rabbit holes than more bullets on my list
bradgessler•35m ago
leakycap•19m ago
> There's been a ton of that, yes...
What are you saying - because some people got rich off Ruby, it's OK that those things happened?
Clearly not - Ruby will be lucky to have a shadow of the community left after this.
bradgessler•9m ago
I'm on the record saying RC did a poor job rolling out these changes and treated the maintainers poorly.
There will be a lot of amazing Rubyists that leave, which is terrible, but it won't be "the shadow of a community left" because there's way too many people who depend on it to feed their families.
insane_dreamer•25m ago
Zed Shaw, sure, but that's a single person (though a very vocal one; I always liked his work, but he was pretty outspoken and that got under people's skin)
DHH - yes, opinionated to a fault and outspoken like ZS, prone to create division, but that was always more about Rails than Ruby (this is not a comment on DHH recently, which I know nothing about; I stopped being active in Ruby/Rails community over a dozen years ago).
Rails vs Merb - again I think you're conflating the Rails community with the Ruby community
leakycap•17m ago
Someone can shush away any behavior if they want, like you have done. Feel free to provide an alternate history or context for the current Ruby community upheaval if you want, but just dismissing the problems of the past doesn't help anyone.
jamesgeck0•5m ago
hitekker•30m ago
It's true Ruby Central was a fiasco and the maintainers should have been treated better. But the author's investigation misses important element like the "culture war" on both sides. That seems to be prime motivation for everyone involved, given the flames raging in the comments below.
leakycap•15m ago
I looked for your publication or helpful comments on this topic, but didn't find them. I'm sure you wrote up something with great detail but no extra detail, and I bet it's very simple for everyone to read. You made it perfect and spared no editing costs before you put it on the web. I just couldn't find it?
> It's true Ruby Central was a fiasco and the maintainers should have been treated better.
Treated better as in ... not removed from their own projects, ownership of the things they built and set up, and ostracized? That is a far stretch of "treated better"
dmix•13m ago
This was likely a reaction to a mix of NPM + culture war/deplatforming, where power player got nervous and decided to clamp down on rubygems security to insulate it from hypothetical bad actors.
insane_dreamer•29m ago
that's an unfair take; the Ruby community was excellent at the beginning
leakycap•14m ago
The project promised a lot in the beginning and some folks new to a language like Ruby were so enthused by what they could do that they didn't pay much attention to the admin drama at the beginning.
bdcravens•21m ago
remix2000•4m ago