Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover

What'd Ruby do to you?

Ruby promised programmer happiness and delivered programmer warfare.

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

Having been there, I don't know what you missed but it sounds like a lot.

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.

It also skipped over the elephant in the room which is NPM's security issues.

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.

> Eh, it's a messy write-up. The article's stream of consciousness is hard to follow. Too much detail in some areas, not enough in others.

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"

Quote:

> 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.

So HSBT was the owner? And transfered ownership?

At the GitHub Enterprise level, you can see that reflected if you look at any of the users profiles https://github.com/mghaught

> 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 ?

How is his code?

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.

> HH 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:

https://www.shopify.com/news/david-heinemeier-hansson-board

Except Matz is aligned with DHH, Tobi and others. I think lots of people confuse "nice" with "supporting every weird American left-wing cause pushed by certain corporations". Keep in mind most of the people who actually run the Ruby ecosystem and drive it forward aren't American, and it's mostly Americans whining about it.

Also, people opposing it (Sidekiq, the guys starting "rv", etc...) have a vested financial interest in opposing Rails and rubygems...

[flagged]

Also the fact that DHH complained about not wanting to live in London because of how many non-whites there are, praising violent far-right agitators, and repeating debunked racist claims.

He used to, but is now stepping into politics, in a conservative / reactionary way.

See: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

I wish. Have you read his blog???

These kind of statements frustrate me. They are kind of manufactured consent statements. I likely don't agree with DHH positions as shared here, but when did we decide platforming very left-leaning positions is good, and platforming very right-leaning ones is bad? I wouldn't even mind if the position was that platforming either is good/bad. The framing here begs the question.

I'm sorry but if DHH posted some inflammatory articles maybe it's better to post those articles for people to judge themselves, than to post what someone else thinks.

Having read stuff from DHH for a long time, this does not surprise me in the least. It just feels like he picked the right time, zeitgeist-wise, to fully come out of the closet.

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.

DHH is on Shopify's board now:

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...

He's really gone off the deep end and evidently knows fuck all about London or the patriotic march he's discussing.

Are you sure you posted the right article? There's nothing about Ruby or RubyGems in it.

What is the issue? He liked the nationalistic display of a march in England?

People are free to lean left or right. Unfortunately bigotry and racism has been rebranded as simply being right leaning politically. Reading some of his recent articles he's neither left or right - just a bit of a racist bigot.

He's regurgitating racist tropes. Whether he knows that or not I don't know. He might be racist, it might just be Dunning-Kruger around whether he can speak authoritatively on social issues (in his post there's no attempt at original thought, just copy-paste).

But...it makes it a little difficult to build an inclusive open source community with that at your head.

‘very fine people on both sides’ - DJT

Read an open source license for once.

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).

If you know anything about the ecosystem you'd know that Ruby Central runs the website/servuce AND maintains the gems, bundler included. Which is why I mentioned both.