I wonder if there's a term for this kind of thing where people use the word "including".
As an example, I might have a non-profit that serves soup at soup kitchens and also pays me to manage it. If someone gives $100k, suppose I pay myself $90k and use $10k to serve soup.
When someone threatens to cut the contribution, I say "This will affect the non-profit's mission since the $100k a year goes to critical things like all the soup served at kitchens".
The impression is to imply that the majority of it goes to the soup. But the majority doesn't, in fact, go to the soup.
It would be useful to have a concise term for this particular kind of deceitfulness.
From the outside, I'd argue that the most neutral way to interpret all of this is to assume good faith and trust every statement that hasn't been explicitly disagreed with by another party. Between what I've read before this blog post and what the author says here, that would lead me to conclude that Andre had years of behaving unprofessionally to Ruby Central and at least on one occasion towards Shopify itself, and then recently when Shopify became the de facto only funding source of Ruby Central, they demanded that Ruby Central take over RubyGems and Bundler, and as part of that, Andre got removed. The lack of communication around it just makes it seem like they had every motivation to try to remove him specifically, and took quite drastic actions to do so, but for unstated reasons chose not to publicize this aspect of it. If this were actually what the stated intentions of the changes were, I might understand it, even if I felt that using financial pressure on a third-party organization to remove someone from a different organization was a bit heavy-handed. Without that, it's hard to feel like this new context changes things much; even if he deserved the outcome personally, making huge changes to infrastructure that a huge community relies on to remove him seems like something worthwhile to be transparent about, and it doesn't do much to raise the level of trust that their stewardship of the infrastructure will be handled responsibly.
My opinion on this might change if the timeline of what happened were challenged in some meaningful way, but allusions to "details that would contradict fact-checks and timelines others have pieced together and published" isn't that. The only way to steel-man an argument that isn't stated is to assume infallibility, and that's just not reasonable to ask people to do.
Context: Justin Searls is a “high profile” person in the Ruby and Rails community. He has a reputation for being a nice person and behaving in good faith.
From a personal standpoint, I can easily take his words at face value. I’m also curious about the views of Aaron “tenderlove” Patterson, who has a similar reputation.
Now that Justin has spoken out, maybe Aaron will take the opportunity to. Both tend to stay out of drama.
Seems like a few old scores are being settled during this drama. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people on the side of RubyGems are avoiding commenting in case any legal disputes play out.
I'm sorry but the article seems pretty biased, and doesn't really give any argument for why what happened would be in any way justified. Author keeps adding their own interpretation to Github comments and events, which — just by looking at the contents — are needlessly negative. For example [1] where commit message states
> We've been continuing to backport bugfixs to the 1.7.x series just for Heroku, but unless Heroku joins Ruby Together I don't have enough time available to make sure that continues to happen.
but OP claims it
> was interpreted as leveraging his control over Bundler as a pay-to-play scheme
I'm sorry but not supporting outdated versions of an open-source tool for a business is perfectly reasonable.
Similarly, [2] was again is described as "was interpreted at the time as indicating the feature would be withheld from Bundler because Heroku had failed to pay Ruby Together.". This is not at all how I read it — the comment just says that the open source project has priorities and not all of them can be implemented given the level of funding it has.
These are just two examples, but the article is riddled with wording like "blatant copying", "brazenly hypocritical", "was interpreted as [a bad thing]" etc.
I just feel like reading a clearly lopsided political piece intended to incite negative emotions towards something/someone. There are just enough facts to make it sound fact-based, but enough of author's own feelings and interpretation that I'm not at all convinced.
In fact, towards the end the author even states that there's been ~6 years where nothing of note happened, before the current drama. That seems like a relatively healthy situation?
First OpenAI, then WordPress and now this. I think we are learning there is a point where VCs using open source become allergic to it. My only suggested solution at this point is to be honest about it. Because only then can solutions emerge.
I feel like very little of that post actually addresses what occurred.
Granted that happens when folks take a form of "don't want to get into it". Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the whole blog entry means anything then.
This is tangential to the main point of the article, but the anecdote about the dongle is interesting to me. The author's point seems to be that it was disturbing that Andre joked that being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) was no big deal. It seems to me there are three potential aspects to this:
1. Being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals)
2. Joking about how that is no big deal
3. Not being transparent about whether your nonprofit blithely funds stuff like a new dongle (and/or meals)
From my perspective #3 is definitely an issue, and I can see how #2 could be annoying, but #1 is not really an issue at all, and it's not clear to me whether it's an issue for the author of this article.
It's not much of a stretch from "programmers working on open source tools deserve to earn an income that's commensurate with what salaried engineers earn at the companies who benefit from those tools" to "programmers working on open source tools deserve a level of overall employment benefits commensurate with etc.". For-profit companies routinely pay for dongles like it ain't no thang, toss money around left and right on meals (even with questionable justification), and so on and so forth. And in fact the people who benefit from this reimbursement do joke about how it's "free" to them, etc. In this context, being reimbursed for dongles and meals seems only another form of leveling the playing field.
Now of course, if people think they're donating only to pay a salary, and it turns out they're paying for meals, that's a problem (#3 in my list above). But if a person is up-front about saying "you're paying to equalize the overall compensation situation between the people who write open-source software and the people who use it", I don't think anyone should be surprised that that person expects to be reimbursed for dongles and meals. I'm not sure whether that was the case here, but, well, it's just something that stood out to me in the article.
In addition to what others said about TFA, This part jumped out to me:
> Specifically, I was sent this commit replacing references to Homebrew from late July. As evidence of Homebrew's authorship was being erased and obscured, no additional acknowledgement was added to credit Homebrew for having created and maintained Portable Ruby since 2016.
A paragraph later the author writes
> In fairness to Andre, the rv-ruby repo continues to retain a copy of Homebrew's LICENSE.txt which names "Homebrew contributors" as the copyright holder. Andre also later added an explicit acknowledgement to the README, but that attribution came more than a month later, and (I'm told) only after he was directly asked to credit the original project.
"In fairness" my ass. How can the author leverage a claim of authorship being erased, when the license is sitting there, untouched, for over a year?
And when someone told Andre to credit the original project... He simply did? Seemingly without any issues. In what universe is this an example of "obscuring authorship"?
Of course, putting this section right after the section where Andre mistakingly accused google of copying code without perserving the original license, leads you to think Andre is a hypocrite, when in fact there were over 7 years between the two "events". The storytelling is doubly dishonest because as Andre kept the original license intact, rendering all implicit claims of hypocrisy void.
I love this article because “I am completely neutral on this topic, anyway totally unrelated I met a guy once and kind of thought he was a dick, here is a decade+ worth of stories and rumors about him that I’ve had catalogued and ready to go” is a genuinely hilarious format for a post. It is so catty, like the dude could’ve just wrote “fuck that Andre guy. Choke on deez nuts!” and it would have the same amount of information value about whatever is going on with Ruby.
10/10 I thoroughly enjoyed that the author saw some confusion about the structure of Ruby and thought “Time to bust out The Many Crimes of Andre.xlsx”
Can I donate somewhere to have the whole RubyGems going to Japan Ruby Core and Ruby Association rather than Ruby central? Makes things simpler. Less Drama.
17 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadI think a total of half a paragraph is about current events in any form.
As an example, I might have a non-profit that serves soup at soup kitchens and also pays me to manage it. If someone gives $100k, suppose I pay myself $90k and use $10k to serve soup.
When someone threatens to cut the contribution, I say "This will affect the non-profit's mission since the $100k a year goes to critical things like all the soup served at kitchens".
The impression is to imply that the majority of it goes to the soup. But the majority doesn't, in fact, go to the soup.
It would be useful to have a concise term for this particular kind of deceitfulness.
My opinion on this might change if the timeline of what happened were challenged in some meaningful way, but allusions to "details that would contradict fact-checks and timelines others have pieced together and published" isn't that. The only way to steel-man an argument that isn't stated is to assume infallibility, and that's just not reasonable to ask people to do.
From a personal standpoint, I can easily take his words at face value. I’m also curious about the views of Aaron “tenderlove” Patterson, who has a similar reputation.
Now that Justin has spoken out, maybe Aaron will take the opportunity to. Both tend to stay out of drama.
> We've been continuing to backport bugfixs to the 1.7.x series just for Heroku, but unless Heroku joins Ruby Together I don't have enough time available to make sure that continues to happen.
but OP claims it
> was interpreted as leveraging his control over Bundler as a pay-to-play scheme
I'm sorry but not supporting outdated versions of an open-source tool for a business is perfectly reasonable.
Similarly, [2] was again is described as "was interpreted at the time as indicating the feature would be withheld from Bundler because Heroku had failed to pay Ruby Together.". This is not at all how I read it — the comment just says that the open source project has priorities and not all of them can be implemented given the level of funding it has.
These are just two examples, but the article is riddled with wording like "blatant copying", "brazenly hypocritical", "was interpreted as [a bad thing]" etc.
I just feel like reading a clearly lopsided political piece intended to incite negative emotions towards something/someone. There are just enough facts to make it sound fact-based, but enough of author's own feelings and interpretation that I'm not at all convinced.
In fact, towards the end the author even states that there's been ~6 years where nothing of note happened, before the current drama. That seems like a relatively healthy situation?
[1] https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby/pull/385/com... [2] https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/1811#issuecommen...
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352432
Bundler Belongs to the Ruby Community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371061
Granted that happens when folks take a form of "don't want to get into it". Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the whole blog entry means anything then.
1. Being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) 2. Joking about how that is no big deal 3. Not being transparent about whether your nonprofit blithely funds stuff like a new dongle (and/or meals)
From my perspective #3 is definitely an issue, and I can see how #2 could be annoying, but #1 is not really an issue at all, and it's not clear to me whether it's an issue for the author of this article.
It's not much of a stretch from "programmers working on open source tools deserve to earn an income that's commensurate with what salaried engineers earn at the companies who benefit from those tools" to "programmers working on open source tools deserve a level of overall employment benefits commensurate with etc.". For-profit companies routinely pay for dongles like it ain't no thang, toss money around left and right on meals (even with questionable justification), and so on and so forth. And in fact the people who benefit from this reimbursement do joke about how it's "free" to them, etc. In this context, being reimbursed for dongles and meals seems only another form of leveling the playing field.
Now of course, if people think they're donating only to pay a salary, and it turns out they're paying for meals, that's a problem (#3 in my list above). But if a person is up-front about saying "you're paying to equalize the overall compensation situation between the people who write open-source software and the people who use it", I don't think anyone should be surprised that that person expects to be reimbursed for dongles and meals. I'm not sure whether that was the case here, but, well, it's just something that stood out to me in the article.
In addition to what others said about TFA, This part jumped out to me:
> Specifically, I was sent this commit replacing references to Homebrew from late July. As evidence of Homebrew's authorship was being erased and obscured, no additional acknowledgement was added to credit Homebrew for having created and maintained Portable Ruby since 2016.
A paragraph later the author writes
> In fairness to Andre, the rv-ruby repo continues to retain a copy of Homebrew's LICENSE.txt which names "Homebrew contributors" as the copyright holder. Andre also later added an explicit acknowledgement to the README, but that attribution came more than a month later, and (I'm told) only after he was directly asked to credit the original project.
"In fairness" my ass. How can the author leverage a claim of authorship being erased, when the license is sitting there, untouched, for over a year?
And when someone told Andre to credit the original project... He simply did? Seemingly without any issues. In what universe is this an example of "obscuring authorship"?
Of course, putting this section right after the section where Andre mistakingly accused google of copying code without perserving the original license, leads you to think Andre is a hypocrite, when in fact there were over 7 years between the two "events". The storytelling is doubly dishonest because as Andre kept the original license intact, rendering all implicit claims of hypocrisy void.
In short, this article is borderline defamation.
10/10 I thoroughly enjoyed that the author saw some confusion about the structure of Ruby and thought “Time to bust out The Many Crimes of Andre.xlsx”