I’ve always acted as a community-oriented person, so I feel it’s my duty to share what really happened, what the current state is, and why Ruby Central has failed in the eyes of the community. This is my perspective — and why I’m leaving Ruby Central by choice, but am being forced out of Bundler, RubyGems, and RubyGems.org.
This post jumps into the center of some controversy in a very unclear place. Is there a short (preferably neutral) summary of what this is all about somewhere?
I got off the Ruby and Rails trains ages ago (around the time that Rails changed the package management solution it used; that convinced me the whole project was not in its "adults in the room" phase yet and I couldn't be bothered to keep up with a project that would require me to pay attention to it every quarter instead of putting a project down for a year and having it mostly work when I picked it up again). Sad to say this kerfluffle hasn't exactly shifted my opinion of the ecosystem.
Contextually it might be relevant that Ruby Central said they wanted to have a Zoom call today to explain everything,
then cancelled it. This was their message.
"Hello Ruby Community, We recognize that our originally scheduled Q&A session overlaps with the observance of Rosh Hashanah and may not have been the best timing for many in our community. We sincerely apologize for the short notice of this change, especially since the session was set to take place tomorrow. In response to the feedback we’ve received, we’ve made the decision to postpone the session. A new date and time will be shared with you in the coming days. In the meantime, we invite you to watch this statement from our Executive Director. This update is intended to ensure everyone receives the same information and can view it at a time that works best for them."
Open source is about licensing and not about governance. There are plenty of open source projects where the owner is a dictator. In this case the owner of the github organization has control over who is a part of it and who has permissions within it.
Ruby central was short for cash, Shopify used that to pressure them into a takeover of several core community repos like bundler so that Shopify can control those indirectly? Is that it?
Tangent: IMO this is why you keep your repos under your account, and don't give them over to a group acct. Unless you no longer want/care about control, or things like this happening. If that's the case and you've moved on or are OK with moving on, then do the group account.
it was never clear what the niche of Ruby was other than being a modernish scripting language for non-critical web dev. I remember Ruby on Rails becoming trendy for web startups with inexperienced programmers (I was one of them) to prototype things in because Active Record was a simple ORM for its time, outside of that there wasn't much other justification for the stack and since the proliferation of similar easy-to-use frameworks in other languages it hasn't been necessary
Ruby Central should have been more involved in the development of rubygems (software) in the past and establish a community and contribution guideline, to secure the project, secure funding, maybe separating concerns (infrastructure, conferences, etc.)
However, taking away funding as retaliation for a conference talk is offensive, too. In the end facts (money) made the decision. I don't think Shopify has bad intentions.
Clearly, it's about the racists tweets and blog posts one prominent member of Rails has made. And the community needs to address this in a clear way. Not with boycotting the wrong parties, especially an infrastructure provider of our community. Thank you Sidekiq for supporting RubyGems in the past, but pulling the plug was not the best move for the community.
The solution is to design package managers around the uniform resource identifier: a way to locate online assets that is mostly (ignoring DNS) decentralised and better than having one org own all the packages.
As a complete outsider I mostly find myself wondering if there's legal recourse for those who were forced out (noting the clear distinction that one person was commenting on between the service owned by Ruby Central and the code that Ruby Central likely has no legal claim to).
OT: DHH speaks true, not everything, but mostly yes.
London is a hellhole, same like other big cities for example in Germany.
(In my country (CZ), Germany is called new middle east, lol)
And as a bonus, you don't have any rights to self-defence, you cannot own a gun, in UK you cannot even use dumb pepperspray for defense, ridiculous.
Great to live in country, where your only option for self-defense is to lay on the ground and die or be raped, while you wait for police.
All these lefties do is to destroy, they don't want to discuss anything.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 42.5 ms ] threadDid they do that?
I got off the Ruby and Rails trains ages ago (around the time that Rails changed the package management solution it used; that convinced me the whole project was not in its "adults in the room" phase yet and I couldn't be bothered to keep up with a project that would require me to pay attention to it every quarter instead of putting a project down for a year and having it mostly work when I picked it up again). Sad to say this kerfluffle hasn't exactly shifted my opinion of the ecosystem.
"Hello Ruby Community, We recognize that our originally scheduled Q&A session overlaps with the observance of Rosh Hashanah and may not have been the best timing for many in our community. We sincerely apologize for the short notice of this change, especially since the session was set to take place tomorrow. In response to the feedback we’ve received, we’ve made the decision to postpone the session. A new date and time will be shared with you in the coming days. In the meantime, we invite you to watch this statement from our Executive Director. This update is intended to ensure everyone receives the same information and can view it at a time that works best for them."
Open source is about licensing and not about governance. There are plenty of open source projects where the owner is a dictator. In this case the owner of the github organization has control over who is a part of it and who has permissions within it.
Ruby central was short for cash, Shopify used that to pressure them into a takeover of several core community repos like bundler so that Shopify can control those indirectly? Is that it?
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 guess the only lesson here is trust no one and keep your repos under your account.
> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits [1]
[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
However, taking away funding as retaliation for a conference talk is offensive, too. In the end facts (money) made the decision. I don't think Shopify has bad intentions.
Clearly, it's about the racists tweets and blog posts one prominent member of Rails has made. And the community needs to address this in a clear way. Not with boycotting the wrong parties, especially an infrastructure provider of our community. Thank you Sidekiq for supporting RubyGems in the past, but pulling the plug was not the best move for the community.
People are not logs floating helplessly in a river. People take decisions and make things happen. They create and run the process, not viceversa.
The critique must be directed at people.
And as a bonus, you don't have any rights to self-defence, you cannot own a gun, in UK you cannot even use dumb pepperspray for defense, ridiculous. Great to live in country, where your only option for self-defense is to lay on the ground and die or be raped, while you wait for police.
All these lefties do is to destroy, they don't want to discuss anything.