>Sidekiq withdrew its $250,000/year sponsorship for Ruby Central
Whoa! I'm blown away that Sidekiq has enough money in the bank that one of their sponsorships is $250k/yr!
Sidekiq the company (actually ContribSys) is just one guy: Mike Perham.[0]
I listened to an interview with Mike a few years ago, and he seemed like he had an amazing setup. He was making about $1M/yr with no employees, just him selling code and contributing to open-source. I don't think he even has servers to keep online.
According to this podcast from 2023, he's now making close to $10M/yr in revenue and is still just running the whole thing by himself.[0] Great life for a solo dev founder!
Mike is salt of the earth, a wonderful man. The community is lucky to have him.
I also of course did not know the size of his donation, but it’s not that surprising. Especially since he didn’t advertise his reason for donating, or his reason for stopping (both of which are principled).
(That's not an implicit criticism of the article, which is extremely appreciated because it's neutral and factual)
I've been away from Ruby for a few years but Shopify always seemed like a huge net positive, sponsoring lots of valuable work on both Ruby and Rails. I never followed Ruby community happenings very closely but I'm not aware of negative feelings towards their community role in the past.
Reading through this, I’m not sure what the fear is of Shopify taking a larger role. They’ve been strong contributors to Ruby for a really long time. Not that I agree with the actions, but I can’t parse what nefarious motives they might have from this article.
Replace Shopfiy with Microsoft, Oracle or etc and surely you can see what worries people might have around a move like this. Just because a company has a positive imago does not mean that their motives align with that of the community.
Microsoft and Oracle sold closed source software that had obtained tremendous leverage in their fields, if not outright monopolies. Historically, Microsoft and Oracle’s business models were threatened by open source. They have reacted in various ways over decades: alternately resisting, embracing, or acquiring control of important projects.
However, Shopify sells SAAS thst runs on open source. What does it benefit them to take over key aspects of infrastructure?
If they disliked what was happening with the OSS tools, they are big and rich enough to maintain forks or their own toolchain.
The OP seems to be associating the start of this controversy with some feud between DHH and the founder of Sidekiq. Shopify is indeed quite aligned with DHH. And there’s some controversy about so-called supply chain attacks, which I understand might inspire a call for a more locked-down organization. But as an outsider I am confused.
There’s a lack of transparency playing out compounded by a poor job rolling out would should be the equivalent of boring corporate security bureaucracy.
Usually when this kind of stuff is rolled out, it’s agreed upon in some form and documented. Then when people are surprised, it’s a matter of pointing to the section in the doc that’s relevant and everybody goes on their way.
From the outside it appears this had none of that, so people are understandably surprised, sad, or angry. Since there’s a lack of transparency, people are filling in the blanks.
Totally on that one. Recently investments in homebrew almost turned it to be a paid tool.
I can totally see someone seizing the opportunity there.
(And if you think it is a good idea, you are a terrible person)
I work for a small company who helps financially for ruby community, and they strongly advocate for other same size companies to do the same so there is balance.
It would be terrible for pypi, rubygems, brew and other repos to be used as political or economical tools.
Large companies can fork and keep living for a while or pay the cost. But for everyone else, including people developing ideas at home, it would be a shot through the heart.
So if you have a company that can help those orgs, press them to do so. If you have 5 USD to help, also do it. It makes the difference.
Anon profit, or even a random person, has their own motivations too that will not be aligned. Linus was herding cats in the kernel back when few contributors were paid by corporations to do it. Anyone that has spent any time on a large-ish OSS project has seen bad maintainers with poor incentives, as seen from the outside
It took a fair amount of reading between the lines, but here's what appears to have happened:
1) People and entities with partial control over RubyGems attempted to cancel DHH.
2) In response, elements aligned with DHH kicked the former out of RubyGems.
3) Everyone involved is now attempting to legitimize their motives as "good engineering."
In other words, "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die."
One person who was a major funder of RubyCentral pulled funding because they were upset at RubyCentral platforming DHH. Neither that person, nor RubyCentral, had control over or ownership of the RubyGems software at that time, though RubyCentral operated the rubygems.org service, which uses the RubyGems software.
The corporation that is the other major funder of RubyCentral (Shopify) responded to this (taking advantage of the fact that this left them the sole significant funder of RubyCentral whom RubyCentral could not afford to alienate) to direct RubyCentral to, without any plausible claim of right, seize control of the RubyGems software repos, and kick out anyone who wasn’t a full-time RubyCentral employee from them.
It’s not about DHH except that that indirectly provided the opportunity, it’s about Shopify seeking to consolidate control of core Ruby infrastructure.
When I choose to pull funding for an organization that makes decisions I disagree with, I'm exercising my discretion to spend my own money in the ways I see fit.
When you do that, you're cancelling someone. That's the difference.
I don't really think this is what happened. Seems pretty straightforward: Shopify wants to decide not just who runs RubyGems.org, but also the RubyGems repos. Separate teams (well, formerly)
Nah, DHH has too much power and authority to be "cancelled". One person pulled his donations - a very generous continuous gift - because he didn't want to fund Ruby Central if they continued to platform bigotry.
Ruby Central screwed themselves by relying on basically two large donors for their funding, and then offended one of those two donors.
Many people trying to cancel him is still a "cancel campaign" in my book. Just a failed one. IMO, it's pretty similar to the last cancel campaign against DHH & his associates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42593223
The term "canceled" seriously needs to be retired.
If I understand correctly, Sidekiq's owner pulled his funding from Ruby Central because of his concerns with DHH. That's... one person.
Of course, many dislike DHH's views. Others like him more for his views. He is outspoken about controversial topics. Obviously this garners him fans, and detractors. Using terms like "canceled" is deeply useless at best.
Cancelling DHH would be a stupid kneejerk reaction given how much of a major part of Ruby’s story is thanks to 37 Signals and their community involvement, including but not limited to Rails.
If this is the reason, I am behind this takeover. It’s weeding out bad actors that have a shortsighted mentality.
I do not want RubyGems and Bundler to become yet another pair of ideological playgrounds for people that spend more time protesting unrelated causes than actually _writing and developing software_.
This article is just so politically charged and opinionated that it is hard to believe that it is coming on a "tech blog". Not to mention, a while back the very same company wanted its employees to have no political discussions at workplace in a widely published article.
It's not a tech blog, it's his personal blog, and it's quite in line with that company post previously; advocate for whatever policies you want on your own time and platform but not on the company's, and since this is his personal blog, he is doing exactly that.
world.hey.com/dhh is not just "a personal blog" as it is simultaneously where he posts everything he wants to publish about his professional work, and sometimes it's literally the official updates on the software he maintains such as Turbo.
If you're an employee at some company you can post about your own work too on your own blog. The fact that he maintains the hosting platform as well doesn't mean much, 37Signals employees can post on Medium or some other blog host too.
If I post something on my personal blog, and it's against the company's Code of Conduct, then I'm in trouble with HR. If I'm the company's CEO, then I'm in trouble with the board. You're not an island.
Then you'll just have to be a CEO with a platform. And if it's on your personal blog, I don't see why you'd be in trouble with HR at any good company, unless they're monitoring your communications.
There's plenty to criticize DHH for but to be fair world.hey.com is a feature of the email platform that lets you easily post a blog. He's using his own software/platform and I realize the optics, but you could post your own thoughts at world.hey.com/muglug too.
Benefit of being one of the owners/cofounders of Sidekiq: if you don't like DHH's shitty opinions, you are free to pull your very generous donation from Ruby Central and send the money somewhere else.
The victim mindset of these people is on another level. DHH presents the openly transphobic Graham Linehan as some kind of free speech victim.
Oh, I should read the actual tweet? Funny the actual tweet is so much worse than I imagined.
If a trans-women is in a space that she is legally entitled to be in, according to him one should:
> Make, a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him[he means the trans-women] in the balls
He is literally telling people to be violent against trans people. And then cries when actions have consequences.
These people are like the school yard bully who will start a fight with you then cry "timeout, timeout" when you punch back. And go to the teacher to convince you they are the real victim.
I was actually shocked he included those tweets as if they were incredibly benign. I now believe this is an intentional move on his part. He knows the tweets are crazy incendiary, he just wants to filter out the audience early. This trend of catering to far right fan boys while maintaining plausible deniability is happening everywhere.
even before, during and after the fascist protest he is celebrating (as an immigrant in america, telling about his daydreaming on being an immigrant in the UK), there have been arrests for people simply saying "killing children is wrong" all over london.
yet he could not pick any of those arests for his example. yeah, it's plain and simple white supremacists. get over it.
I don't know why everyone pretends that having an incorrect opinion is some untouchable thing and we just have to respect it.
Everyone, you included, has opinions that they find unpalatable. Pretty much all of human history has been "cancelling" people for "incorrect opinions". I mean, what were the crusades? Or world war II?
There's no, like, gun to your head saying you have to respect things you don't respect. Some things are just not respectable. You're allowed to be like "no" and then decide to get as far away from the person as possible.
And, relatedly - you don't have to run away. You can push them away.
Its not really fair that crazy people are allowed to say crazy things then we, normal people, have to take the high ground and walk away. What if I don't want to walk away? Why do I have to leave a project like it's the plague because you said something insane?
Anyway, just my two cents.
Also, just to be clear: I don't think DHH is crazy or evil. I'm addressed the broader concept, not this specific case.
> Its not really fair that crazy people are allowed to say crazy things then we, normal people, have to take the high ground and walk away. What if I don't want to walk away? Why do I have to leave a project like it's the plague because you said something insane?
This takes as axiomatic that people with incompatible beliefs in one area cannot work together in a different area.
I really like that my job has me working with lots of different people from lots of walks of life, and we are too busy saving lives to think too much about politics.
However, if I found out that one of the physicians I work with doesn't think I should have a job, doesn't think I should have equal rights, and doesn't think I belong in public spaces, then politics would become unavoidable. I'm not going to work for a bigot who sees me as a second class citizen.
Likewise there are a number of long-term Ruby OS contributors who belong to minority groups DHH has been attacking. Would you attend Railsconf if DHH called your ethnicity gangs of rapists, like he recently has?
They can, but it really depends on the belief. Even for you or the most principled person, there is a limit.
And, even if you can, it doesn't mean it's pleasant.
Its one thing if someone is horrible in silent. From experience, horrible people seem to be the most confident and outspoken. Maybe there's a common character flaw that underpins both behaviors.
> This takes as axiomatic that people with incompatible beliefs in one area cannot work together in a different area.
"Beliefs" are when you think The Strokes are superior to The White Stripes, or that Giordano's deep dish pizza is superior to Lou Malnati's, or that IPAs are better than lagers. I'll happily work with people who espouse those beliefs, despite my beliefs to the contrary.
I won't work with people who describe a Tommy Robinson march as "heartwarming", or who use terms like "demographic nightmare" [1] to describe immigration, or who amplify repeatedly-debunked [2] claims of "Pakistani rape gangs", all of which DHH did. That's bigotry, not beliefs.
British culture isn't being eroded by immigration. It's being shaped by it, just like it has been for thousands of years. Where do you think your culture came from- thin air?!?
- Romans gave Britain roads, baths, and Christianity.
- Anglo-Saxons gave Britain Old English.
- Vikings gave Britain laws and half its place names.
- Normans made French the language of power and fused it with English.
- The Crusades brought new foods, science, and art.
And so on and so on.
It's the height of ignorance to look at that incredibly diverse history, and then say "OK, but right now is the moment in time where we 'lock in' our culture for the rest of time." Culture has never stood still, and no one, not even DHH, gets to freeze it in place. Well, they can try, but they'll be pissing in the wind, just like the Tommy Robinson marchers were.
I'll just leave this here: the folks in this Instagram reel [3], wearing the St. George's Cross flag and clearly on their way to the march, decided to stop and get a curry first. With the caption "When you're on your way to the racist march but the immigrant food is popping."
> ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’
I can’t comment on the decisions people made in this case, I was taking up GP’s musings on who we should let have what opinions in general.
I guess I would say that withdrawing funding from an organization based on who they let speak at an event seems like an overreaction given that it had these ramifications, but I don’t think it’s my place to judge what anyone chooses to contribute their own money to. None of the rest of us is contributing $250k to Ruby Central either, and we’re not entitled to have Mike solve our problems.
>I guess I would say that withdrawing funding from an organization based on who they let speak at an event seems like an overreaction given that it had these ramifications
Wait wait wait, now it's Mike's fault that Shopify acted the way it did and coup'd this organization? Come on. You can't judge his choice to remove funding on what someone else did.
Basically, it is ok for bigots like DHH to spread their opinions and to try to push away or harm people they dont like.
But, if you push back or criticise them, that is something wrong. The harm can go only one way - from bigots to the rest of us. But other way round, once you funded bigots you have to continue with it.
As far as I can tell, the direct chain of events preceding this coup-like event was:
Ruby Central hosts DHH at RailsConf in July --> Sidekiq withdraws funding from Ruby Central --> Ruby Central is essentially entirely dependent on Shopify.
The "what" seems to be purely a reaction to this article DHH posted:
Strictly speaking, DHH's September blog post could not have driven this unless there was a time machine involved. However, DHH has made some contentious political statements in the past so perhaps what you're saying is true in a larger sense.
It's certainly possible that Shopify's actions had nothing to do with either side's politics in particular, and they decided it was simply safer for them to control Ruby Cental and RubyGems rather than rely on an independent organization with unstable funding (that they were basically solely funding anyway according to the article)
I don't love that outcome. As a Ruby fan, I don't want Ruby or bits of its infrastructure controlled by a particular organization.
Ruby Central [announces that it will] hosts DHH at RailsConf [6 weeks before the event is due to happen, when it's too late for people to refund their conference tickets and plane tickets too] in July 2025.
He's been posting controversial stuff for quite a while, you certainly can't distill this to one blog post.
DHH stopped trying to cultivate an inclusive community some time ago. The ruby community can ill afford to drive away more prominent maintainers, yet that is what is happening here, as the corporate interests are aligned with DHH even if the rest of the community is not.
Speaking of incorrect opinions, it's pretty hard not to read this and conclude his "no politics at work" initiative was just him seeing his company was full of liberals he found annoying and this was his scheme to kick them all out.
If DHH had genuinely progressive instincts, he would likely have been more even-handed. He could have credibly said: “look, I’m personally left-leaning, but I want work to stay apolitical for everyone’s sanity”
Instead, the intensity of his crackdown, coupled with later statements aligning him with reactionary causes, strongly suggests his “neutrality” was in practice a shield against progressive causes inside Basecamp.
Is it unfair that you can only impose a “no politics” rule without backlash if you’re progressive? Maybe a little. But the asymmetry is baked in: progressives are the ones challenging the status quo, so banning politics almost always protects the status quo and silences the challengers. And in this case, his later positions confirmed that he wasn’t neutral at all, he wasn’t on the side of the people he’d told to leave.
It’s pretty galling to see someone who’s never lived in London talk mad shit about it. London is my home, not DHH’s. He knows fuck all, which is why he repeats tired, overcooked falsehoods.
What he’s saying is that he only considers white British to be legitimately British. He would look at former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and current Mayor Sadiq Khan and dismiss them as insufficiently British. Too much melanin I guess.
He’s even excluded white people from elsewhere who were born in Britain if they have a non-British ancestor. So according to DHH and his ilk Nigel Farage’s children wouldn’t be counted as white British despite having white mothers (Irish and German), being born to a British father in Britain and living all their lives in Britain.
What the fuck is the point of dividing people like this? “Just an opinion” my ass. DHH and people like him are dehumanising my fellow Londoners.
I actually accidentally walked into that protest while doing touristy stuff in London that weekend (yeah, great weekend to choose) and first it looked weird having all those people waving British and English flags walking around.... and then I noticed many wore shirts with "Make Britain White Again" (sic) slogans and unironically wearing "Make Britain Great Again" hats. Whatever that thing was, it was about as peaceful as "Truth Rallies" Milošević organized before the whole 1990s war in Balkans went down.
It's just another example of someone straying outside of their sphere(s) of expertise ... there are some excellent examples to the contrary, but fuck you money tends to tempt those with weak characters into these situations.
Incredibly sad to watch. He literally has no idea what he's talking about.
My girlfriend witnessed a robbery in London's city center ~2 weeks ago, in the second day of our visit. After that, we saw a homeless guy pooping on a wall; some of them screaming at others.
I didn't feel like I was personally in danger, but I'm also a guy who's lived next to American slums.
I almost had my MacBook stolen out of my backpack from me in London (Shoreditch) a few years in broad daylight - by a black person that didn't even speak English during the attempted robbery.
I'm from Africa so I'm born with the instincts that luckily prevented me from losing anything or getting hurt.
I was just visiting the UK for 3 weeks, but that gave me a perspective how bad immigration laws can turn it into something out of control.
Why does a place like Singapore, where 48% of its workforce are immigrants / expats - not have this problem.
To add to your anecdata, had you visited London during the time of Dickens you would have had your possessions thieved by a charming raffish urchin that spoke English in a dialect you also wouldn't have understood.
It sounds like a mix of good intentions, misunderstandings, and poor communication.
Shopify wanted to put in place better goverance and access control, to reduce the risk of a supply chain attack and put a deadline on that.
Part time maintenaners left it to the last minute, didn't consult or communicate well and then over exerted their influence by taking over things without consensus to do so.
Existing maintainers then rightfully alarmed, when it all could probably have been handled better.
Doesn't help that the rift over a competing tool being created probably played a part in some of the heavy handedness. DHH's drift to white supremacy probably hasn't helped either, but likely neither are the cause here.
I don't know about this interpretation. The blog post points out that one of the conditions of the continued funding by Shopify was literally removing one of the specific maintainers of the stolen tooling who had been working on it them for a decade, and it provided ample evidence that this was funding that essentially was the only thing keeping the service afloat. It's kind of hard to imagine threatening to sink the entire RubyGems service unless the people in charge of it steal ownership of a related but separately owned tool to force out one specific person as "good intentions" but with "poor communication" when it's presented the way it has been by the perpetrators.
To preempt any potential objections on the basis of the removed funding from Sidekiq based similarly on a relationship with a single person, there are two pretty crucial differences: the funding was withdrawn because of the relationship the organization had itself with someone, rather than someone involved with something that literally had to be stolen to terminate their involvement, and the funding withdrawn by Sidekiq was done openly with umambiguously communicated intentions. Deciding to not give money to an organization because of an actual choice that they made and tell everyone that is just being transparent about your morals; secretively pressuring an organization to exploit their existing connections to force someone out of a project they don't own and then having them represent it publicly as something they chose to do on their own for the greater good might as well be out of the playbook of organized crime or foreign intelligence services.
> To strengthen supply chain security, we are taking important steps to ensure that administrative access to the RubyGems.org, RubyGems, and Bundler is securely managed.
Ridiculously bold to say when what happened here was literally a malicious supply chain attack.
If money makes them do things like this, what's stopping them from bundling Bonzi Buddy if Shopify is bought out by PE and starts cutting funding to "useless" stuff? (Yes, it's a hyperbolic example)
I wasn't expecting such a nice writeup. Worth a read.
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.
I've never written a line of Ruby in my life so this is coming from an outsiders perspective, but after this I don't know how anyone ever works with these people again. I would think the entire community would start finding ways to migrate away. Presumably those repos can be forked, and it sounds like a new source of Gems can be hosted. I doubt it would be easy by any stretch of the imagination, but essentially this entire leadership team just showed themselves to be entirely untrustworthy.
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
I wrote a book on Merb and was an active contributor. Before that I had developed several apps with Rails.
That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition and I don't view the Rails vs Merb period as itself having been problematic.
Merb devs believed we could make app development both simple to start (as a single file like Sinatra) and easy to evolve (into a modular codebase with Rails-like conventions). Existing outside of the Rails ecosystem allowed Merb to pursue that distinct vision.
The Merge between Rails and Merb, accreted many of Merb's modular architectural enhancements to Rails, but sadly deprecated the overall Merb vision. To me that was a shame, but I still wouldn't describe any of it as toxic.
> I wrote a book on Merb and was an active contributor.
It might be a situation where you see it differently because you were involved or benefiting from the way things unfolded
> That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition [...] wouldn't describe any of it as toxic
Competition can be healthy, Rails vs Merb was anything but. Quotes from Yehuda himself:
••• "I was just so blinded by tribalism that I never even bothered to check how fundamental the disagreements really were."
••• "waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy"
••• "It's so easy for our brains to turn disagreements about priorities into value conflicts. It takes a lot of effort to see past that mistake."
Engine Yard's management took several strategic missteps over the years. One of them was stifling Merb. The quotes from Yehuda describe his difficulty in making the best of a forced merger.
Ezra's vision for Merb and DHH's vision for Rails were distinct. Both warranted development. Over time, I assume they would have collectively strengthened the Ruby community. It was a mistake for Engine Yard's management to have instead framed it as zero sum and forced a merger.
There’s been a ton of that, yes, but for most people who are building applications and websites with Ruby, it’s been stable, productive, and prosperous.
No, I'm saying there's a lot of people who won't even know this happened. Fewer will know that it happened, but they'll view it as a scenario where the ends justify the means.
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.
> No, I'm saying there's a lot of people who won't even know this happened.
In the world of "I'm sorry to that man" this seems like a given about literally everything.
Not knowing something happened is called being uninformed, and it doesn't change things or make the person right just because they don't know about something that occurred.
> There will be a lot of amazing Rubyists that leave
We agree. Listen, WebObjects still has a somewhat active community. Ruby's community won't be helped by recent events, but recent events happened because the Ruby community has been backstabby for a long time and no one has stopped it because there's too much money to be made in the meantime to care about things like people.
Ruby's status of having, like, two companies that are big and known to use Ruby (Shopify and 37Signals) is the reason why this was allowed to happen (three if you include Github, but my understanding is that its used less-and-less there). I have doubts that anyone could name another company or group most people have heard of using Ruby in any significant capacity. Its a dying language that does not have the legs to survive this drama.
Many if not all of these companies are, to my knowledge, companies like Github which might still have some legacy parts of their system running Ruby, but aren't building significant new code in Ruby; and if they do have Ruby, are trying to reduce its prevalence in their system.
Your claim would have more standing if 1) it made sense vs. the news and recent yearslong turn away from Ruby development, and 2) if you included any sources or information other than "nuh uh"
Square was originally a single RoR monolith. We spent a decade burning it to the ground with a Java and Go microservice architecture.
Some product surface area remains Ruby, but Ruby was chased away by most teams.
Square brought in a lot of Xooglers over the years to lead the transition, so you see a lot of Google tech: protobufs, gRPCs, at one point a pre-Kubernetes Borg clone, etc.
"Actually, the Ruby community ripped itself apart a decade ago and has never changed and still suffering from the consequences except with the recent thing with the founder" is not a strong argument
No, but listing things that happened over the course of over a decade, some of which are well resolved and others (like why’s leaving) are questionable how they’re an indication of drama.
He left public programming, including Scratch, entirely.
Ha yep. I remember a lot of this drama from my early days working with rails. But my impression is that none of this mattered and has long been water under the bridge. (I didn't know until reading about this current episode that there is new DHH drama.)
_why's departure had nothing to do with the Ruby community, as far as we know (unless some new info has come to light recently)
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
If you don't realize the overlap in the Rails and Ruby on Rails community, I'm not sure what corner of the Ruby world you've been hiding in.
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.
I'm not dismissing the problems of the past. I just don't think they were as big problems as you make them out to be. It's not like I wasn't around or unaware, I just didn't let it bother me - and was happy with how things were developing despite some arguments around the fringes as in any community.
> I'm not sure what corner of the Ruby world you've been hiding in.
I did say that I haven't been involved for the past dozen years. Before that I was definitely there when Rails burst onto the Ruby scene and its early years. I realize the overlap but they were still pretty distinct -- though maybe that's changed in the past decade.
"it didn't affect me so I didn't care" is a common and valid feeling up until you are aware of what is happening
I developed with Ruby from the beginning and loved Ruby on Rails for many reasons. The community's backstabbing nature and callousness toward people who put a lot of work in was not something I ever admired and it's led us here.
You’ve made a lot of comments in this thread, and they come across far more subjective than objective. For people who have just been getting along and making things, they’re unlikely to be all that persuasive.
There's ruby the tech and there's ruby the community.
The former is mature, robust, fit for purpose.
The latter is... messy.
DHH's prominent role in the ecosystem and full throated endorsement of reactionary politics has alienated a lot of people who might otherwise have been invested in that community, and this latest maneuvering seems downstream of all that.
At this point the tension between corporate interests (and by extension DHH, who is a central player in that group) and open source / community interests has become frustratingly high, and it all seems like it could have been avoided.
It doesn't mean ruby is dead or even dying, but you can't blame anybody for looking at this and just noping right out over to a community without such drama.
I don't know anything about Ruby so forgive my ignorance. As I understand it there were repos required to run the RubyGems Service. This was of interest to major corporate players. Instead of removing the original authors, why didn't they just fork the requirements?
And wouldn't that constitute a violation of ownership? Or did the authors wave that away by joining the respective GitHub org in the first place?
It is murkier as the involvement of some of the original creators in Ruby Central is there, so there are claims to being the original copyright holder applicable to some areas by a very small number of individuals, none of which who are the newly added maintainers, or Ruby Central as a whole entity.
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.
I was there too - I didn't "miss a lot", I just ignored it. The community was still vibrant, helpful, and the language/tools were developing nicely. So some people with big egos (ZS, DHH etc.) were causing waves. Who cares. I don't get swept up in that sort of thing. Not letting it affect you is different from not being aware of it, it just means not getting involved with it.
I'm still very happy with Ruby itself, and how it's developed, and Rails too. While I haven't used it professionally in a while, it's still the language I most enjoy working in. I also used it to get my daughter (now finished college and working as a SWE) into programming when she was a child, and currently using it to introduce my 9 yr old son to coding.
I think Ellen Dash, André Arko, Samuel Giddins, Martin Emde, and even Mike McQuaid could be proposed as individuals who care. In addition to the hundreds of people commenting here.
> While I haven't used it professionally in a while, it's still the language I most enjoy working in.
Perhaps now that you're up to date on some important issues in the Ruby community, you can get involved and help right the ship so the language you love will exist in a few years.
I don't really want to continue debating the other points, but I will say one last thing. There's a difference between caring about the language/ecosystem/community, and caring about the drama introduced by certain individuals. I care very much about the former, and I believe the latter to be an unhelpful distraction rather than something to be "solved". But that's just me.
And just to clarify: when I say "who cares", I was talking about some of this drama in the past, egos and whatnot. I am _not_ talking about what just happened now with RubyCentral. I consider that to be a serious problem with real-world consequences that go beyond disputes/differences of opinions. It's no way to handle OSS and treat maintainers. It does put a bad stain on RubyCentral, which is unfortunate.
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.
It's true Ruby Central was a fiasco and the maintainers should have been treated better. But the author's investigation misses important elements like the "culture war" on both sides. That seems to be prime motivation for everyone involved, given the flames raging in the comments below.
Your critique of the author's writing style doesn't seem like your strongest argument.
> 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? Treated better as in... not kicked out of things they built by someone else who has something to gain?
Treated better is not the phrase to describe what should have happened here.
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.
Why were Samuel Giddins and André Arko singled out to be removed? What was their transgressions and to whom? From the write-up it sounds like Shopify wanted them out, but why?
> 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.
You left out the really gross quote from Rafael França: "I’m not so sure I trust them to not sabotage rubygems or bundler." I'm not eager to work with a community with leaders who say things like that in it. Imagine spending years volunteering work that helps a company like Shopify only to have someone malign your work like that.
I didn't understand why anyone would think that way. Python has new package management/build tools all the time and to my knowledge there's no drama about it, other then the normal dev arguments over which tools are best.
I'm reconsidering my opinion of Rafael considering the trajectory of DHH's rhetoric, and that Rafael has stayed in support of DHH throughout this time while many others have publicly called him out. Concerning.
At some point the majority will learn that no matter the public messaging most large companies will do what benefits their incumbency over what is best for the industry or customers.
It’s worth noting the weren’t the only ones signaled out. At least one maintainer who had worked closely with them, but not been involved in RV also got tarred with the “too involved with André or too politically similar”
It’s also worth nothing that DHH has moved against André before, via organizing a letter to his Board. In addition to any personal dispute and radically different politics (André is about as left as DHH is right in labor issues) there is how that’s played out in funding open source. André founded RubyTogether as a trade guild and DHH seemed to disapprove of rubygems/bundler maintainers getting paid directly by community support like that. I do not know if a black trans woman getting paid was part of what DHH was against or if she was collateral damage in his move.
André annd another maintainer worked (and a designer), together through my company on rubygems stuff for RC, at a great discount. Mostly we tried to structure it so they kept getting paid enough for to cover health insurance for their families, etc, while mostly rolling our company down.
It’s hard not to read it as “people who worked closely with André, whether or not they were going to work on RV, were targeted”. I think the fact that I am also a trans woman is bores coincidental, even given DHH’s politics. I don’t think he even remembers who I am and I don’t we mostly a tangential factor in any of this.
> they had a problem with Ruby Central taking control of the RubyGems open source code repositories and gems, which Ruby Central never owned.
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?
I said in the post that HSBT who was a maintainer invited Marty as an owner of the GitHub account. This was against the wishes of the other maintainers who had established practices for adding new maintainers.
It would seem that HSBT being a maintainer owner AND shopify employee faced a significant conflict of interest. Also I don’t think it’s a stretch given the context and clear direction coming from shopify for the actions of others to assume that HSBT themselves were directed by their employer to add Marty as an owner.
I sense there’s legal grounds here but can’t fully articulate what the legal case would be.
He’s one of the most active Japanese Ruby core committer, employed by ANPAD, and also part time contractor for Ruby Central, and one of the most active committers to rubygems/bundler.
That is explained in the "On 9 September, HSBT ..." paragraph, which describes how an existing RubyGems maintainer did - and then undid (most) - changes. A new user remained as an owner of the RubyGems GitHub organization - which allowed Ruby Central to do things later.
It looks like all these Ruby package maintainers decided to, for the sake of convenience perhaps, keep their primary repos under a single 'Ruby Gems' GitHub org. That's what allowed Ruby Central to kick them out and take control of all the repos.
Maybe just don’t be part of a GitHub organization that can take over your shit if you don’t want them to. We really need a GitHub feature where maintainers can enter an organization but still retain ultimate control over their repository and take it back out if they start being annoying.
Maintainers could also use that to distrupt things in the same way, to be fair.
A two-key-rule system would be neat. A repo can be in an org, but some big changes (removing/adding a maintainer, moving a repo, renaming an org, etc) need to have x of total maintainer accounts click an approve button within a few days of each other. Making big changes slow and tedious feels ideal when we're talking about the countless lifehours sunk into a project by maintainers, that's funded and supported by a company. Both of those parties benefit from cooling off periods and being a bit obstinant to eachother... without being able to slit eachothers throats.
I understand Ruby Central doesn't own the source code, it's open source, and that they own the service, but who owned the GitHub account/repo ? Who created it originally?
The same people who created ruby central write the first versions of rubygems iirc (David Black , Chad Fowlernetc). But that was a long time ago and I'm not sure it matters to the current kerfuffle.
> and I'm not sure it matters to the current kerfuffle
I guess I find it a bit strange that it's so fuzzy who owned the GitHub repo.
So it was owned by a GitHub organization, and someone should have owned that organization no? Maybe the person that created it initially?
You can have more than one person with a role that allows to change ownership of repos owned by an organization, was that the situation here? Did multiple people had that permission and one of them re-owned the repo to themselves without any other knowing?
I say that because, I don't normally consider every code contributor to a repo, or even admin the owner of a repo.
If I create an open source lib, and then create a GitHub repo for it, and contributors come in, to help commit code, do PRs and even manage the repo, and later I decide to revoke everyone else's access, as the owner, like it's fine. Sure maybe some of the admins might wonder what's up, why I don't trust them administering the repo anymore, but it's my repo.
Here I'm struggling to identify whose repo is it? And was the repo owner kicked out of their own repo, so this is a takeover? Or did the owner just kick out others ?
now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! he was definitely one of the prominent people keeping the ruby mailing list fun and friendly back in the day; I miss that early ruby era where everyone was enthusiastic about how nice the language felt to use.
I wonder if rv will come up with a good packaging story. I maintain one (small, single-author, and not at all popular) gem, and I'm very disinclined to push any new updates to ruby central, but since it's an end-user app I'll be looking for a good language-agnostic way to provide a downloadable version.
This move would make me vary of building on any ecosystem that has too few funders on it. At least if they are call themselves open source communities. If platform is owned by single player from start rules are clear.
But if there is only few funding it might come back to bite me. So maybe such cases are bad technology choices. Even if one is not malicious now, it does not tell about future or any decisions they might force through.
Part of the long term supply chain question is that you trust who’s in charge. This corporate takeover of Ruby central and now Ruby gems is deeply concerning for the state of the Ruby ecosystem.
Meanwhile the Ruby core team is in Japan, would you like them to report in for work orders to shopify too?
Tom Stuart gave a really good lightning talk about this a decade ago, which is very respectful and has aged well https://tomstu.art/the-dhh-problem
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.
He made time for anyone who wanted to engage him in a sincere discussion. He helped a lot of newer people. He wrote beautiful tools that we still use.
He embodied MINASWAN. That has been the core of Ruby's community.
DHH has been pretty damn far from that.
Did many of us find Ruby through Rails? Sure. Does that mean that Ruby should be stewarded by someone who is intolerant and therefore exclusionary? No.
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.
> 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
Yes, but you don't really need to worry, because those things aren't a real threat to you. Imagine if you were a member of a minority group making up 1% of the population, with a government actively persecuting you.
Is DHH part of the government, one that is actively persecuting a minority? If not, then you're talking about someone who is not in power and not persecuting a minority (or anyone). How is that relevant?
Supporting people that want to and are pushing for the government to kill you and your loved ones seems like such an odd thing for someone to do. Not even sure how to describe it.
Someone linked an article above that is worth a read - He's said some pretty horrific stuff about minority groups & is echoing discredited sentiment on immigrants and other minorities. It's worth a read.
The Ruby community has long had a rift between two types of members, the really nice folks that take after Matz, and techbro assholes like DHH. The former have mostly tolerated the latter creating an ugly toxicity that the community has become known for, and is why I use Ruby, but have not involved myself with it. Zed Shaw, a well-known asshole himself, described it in this piece: https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto
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.
Just to add a bit of context here... DHH was added to the Shopify board last year. Shopify also brought in a CTO with very questionable actions and statements during multiple company townhalls and all-hands. He would be making wild statements on stream while VPs would be in the Slack channel trying to defuse and reframe. This was a big reason why I left Shopify last spring.
It would be more accurate to say that the rift is between intolerant progressive activists and people who just want to work on the code without getting politics involved.
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...
Probably the fact that DHH introduced Solid Queue to Rails which can replace Sidekiq. Of course they're not going to say that, it'll be some excuse about his lukewarm European politics...
I've formed a positive opinion of Parham's character by the way he's conducted himself over the years. And Solid Queue isn't a serious Sidekiq replacement for the types of high volume applications where you'd want a Sidekiq license; I doubt he even sees it as a threat.
Do a Google search for Sidekiq DHH. First link is about migrating from Sidekiq to Solid Queue. Third result (for me anyway) is a Reddit thread where Perham talks about trying to make Basecamp a customer and that he wasn't able to...
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.
I can see how you'd read it that way, but I read it like this, "I went to Lisbon and it was basically a bunch of California programmer bros. The culture there has been lost, and that loss is regrettable."
In other words, it can be read more charitably as a lamentation about the loss / changing of a culture.
Nah, it's pretty clearly dog-whistling for racists. Talking about 'native Brits' vs 'mass immigration' changing the 'culture and makeup'? People don't say 'makeup' to refer to California programmer bro culture, they are talking about racial makeup.
Then he goes on about 'Pakistani rape gangs' and 'abuse of British girls'–oh look, the classic trope of the nasty browns and blacks preying on our precious white children.
Then take this: 'There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.'
These words would not be out of place in 1066 Britain ie 'this is a country of the Saxons, not the Normans'. Britain has seen this exact brand of xenophobia for millennia, in fact they even had periods of bigotry against Danes! If dhh had gone to London at the wrong point in history, he might have experienced racial prejudice.
Sure, they don't like DHH. I never much liked him either (too opinionated for my taste), though Rails is a really good thing and honestly put Ruby on the map, and DHH deserves credit for that. But seriously, pull all their funding because of being platformed at RailsConf (_Rails_Conf, not _Ruby_Conf). Seems over-reactionary, and ultimately hurtful to the Ruby community (making them more dependent on Shopify).
Update: To be fair, I haven't followed DHH/Rails/Ruby community for the past decade (was very involved ~15 yrs ago), so my views may be outdated. Still I think pulling the funding doesn't help Ruby.
I don't like DHH (for whatever reason), and I would never want to spend my own money on 'platforming' him. It seems pretty reasonable that someone/company applies discretion to which community events they sponsor.
Sure it feels good to pull money as a kneejerk reaction and virtue signalling, but it's still generally a good idea to think through the consequences of your actions.
We should be thankful a project like Sidekiq sponsored so much money over such a long period. Whatever reason they had to pull out, the blame should lie on the lack of other companies stepping in and keeping some power balance.
Its especially wild given how their action in pulling funding seems to have been a prime motivator for this power grab: in their attempt to boycott DHH, they quite literally handed him the keys to the kingdom.
It does imply an option here. For the affected ruby gems core team to strike up a sponsorship agreement and launch a forked ruby gems service. For developers who agree that the original team was treated terribly, it’s a one line code change at the top of our Gemfiles to get behind a new gem repository.
I’m angry because I thought this was initially heavy handedness on shopify’s part.
Instead it’s people abusing the trust and power they have to try and cancel DHH because they don’t agree with him about some things. Absolutely sickens me to see the cancellation in motion. Completely bigoted and self righteous behaviour.
The moment I saw Arko's name I knew what this was about, the petty culture war that some in the Ruby community engage in, and I was right. My only surprise is that something is finally being done.
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.
Well yes, thinking people should be treated equally regardless of their sexuality or color of their skin is good, and the opposite is bad. Is that the kind of "very left leaning position" you had in mind? Or something else?
Sure: importing migrants with no end in sight while shutting down any convo over what the limit should be; there is no limit and you're racist if you disagree.
And it's not a principled position on open borders nor open migration but instead part of a double standard. These same people probably cheer on the protests in Mexico City against white gringos in Condesa.
That's how I'd summarize the far left position. The far right one is probably that migrants are bad. And I suppose the middle position is that there's a problem when immigration rate outpaces cultural assimilation.
Is unlimited immigration really popular among the far left? Sounds more like a libertarian position to me.
After some quick googling I can't find any groups that support that.
I did find a poll that shows 64% of Americans support creating some path for undocumented immigrants to get legal status. I'm not sure you could call 64% a far left position though.
Here's a NYTimes article from 2020 https://archive.md/uJl8t and another from 2025 https://archive.md/5az0U.
No one wants the "open borders" label but there was and still remains many who see migrants as the source of their personal salvation.
> Is unlimited immigration really popular among the far left?
That this is being memory-holed, much like the ill-conceived bilingual education initiatives of the 90s, is actually a good sign, as it's proof that we're winning.
Excellent! Thank you for finding that, my Google fu isn't as strong as it used to be.
I'm still not sure that's representative of the far left. Like I said, the more right wing libertarian position is probably the same, though for different reasons.
If we're talking about the US, that's a straw man. There was a study that made objectively clear that the right is several times more actively violent than the left.
"Both sides" is a euphemistic fig leaf of an argument at best.
To be fair, neither do the right-leaning ones; the ones that do have fallen completely on their side. It's just that societal discourse has been purposefully skewed so that the mean lean is 60 degrees to the right, making it very easy for weak individuals to fall over.
> hen did we decide platforming very left-leaning positions is good, and platforming very right-leaning ones is bad?
The same way DHH can have opinions, one-man-companies forking the sponsorship momey can have some too. "We" didn't decide anything, a sponsor company decided to stop sponsoring (with no public commentary), that's all that happened.
More to the point, "platforming" is an active operation, I think anyone can decide who they want to promote and why. It's fundamentally different from censoring.
I disagree with this framing as well. There's nothing wrong with "right-leaning" statements or opinions. DHH can talk all he wants about a desire for smaller governments, opinions on gun control, or conservative fiscal policy.
However, people that espouse intolerance of others based on the colour of their skin is just objectively bad. Sometimes there is a right and a wrong side to things. The problem is that some on the political-right seem to have aligned themselves with policy or viewpoints that stand for hatred.
You would need to identify specific far left views that would be comparably objectionable. I’m not going to be upset if someone has wonky ideas about free market systems or tax codes. DHH has said some objectively racist rhetoric on his blog and called Tommy Robinson’s recent march “heartwarming”.
I think the real issue is framing blatant racism as a 'very right-leaning' opinion. It does a disservice to people who have normal conservative opinions on economic or social issues. We've moved past race as a social issue long ago. It's not a debate that should be had anymore. Racists aren't conservative or right wing - they're just bigots.
And to be clear, you can discuss immigration policy without being racist. In the blog post in question DHH gives his support to a convicted criminal, who is also a former member of an explicitly fascist political party and founder of an islamophobic hate group. That's not 'right-leaning'. It's support for a racist criminal. I'm unsure whether DHH is actually a bigot or just completely engulfed in the rhetoric common on Twitter these days. Either way he's a fucking moron pontificating on something which he has no actual experience of. Maybe when the US invades Greenland and starts deporting the Danes from the US he'll discover empathy.
I read the DHH post in question: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64. It is pretty standard anti-immigrant. It feels like it is acknowledging the fact that the populations of Western countries are in a demographic crisis, they are sub-replacement in terms of fertility but instead of fixing that he just wants to ban immigrants. It feels like fixing the fertility issue would solve the root issue.
You don't need to carry water for racists and invent more palatable explanations for what they said. There's nothing in there about not enough British people - only about too many foreigners (whom he can tell by looking at them).
Promoting sustainable fertility is good in my books. We need sustainable fertility like we need sustainable environmentalism, and similar things.
I strongly believe that low fertility causes immigration backlash because some governments try to maintain their population by importing immigrants rather than fixing the fertility issue and a low fertility causes the domestic population to be insecure (e.g. "replacement theory") in the face of the immigrants. Some immigration combined with sustainable fertility is the solution.
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.
The question was "Why was "platforming" DHH bad?". Some people disagree with the views represented in that linked blog post, and do not wish to sponsor events that showcase him.
Personally, I think DHH is a troll and would never be interested in sponsoring, or attending, an event that involved him.
David Heinemeier Hansson, also known by his initials DHH, is a Danish programmer, writer, entrepreneur, and racing driver. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a web framework written in Ruby.[1]
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.
Just read DHH's Sept 15th Heyworld post ... what an absolute sh1t spiral ... it reads like someone who's bubble of information has defeated them. Is that what getting old looks like? .... terrifying .... he sounds like the wanker corner of our local pub .. the only difference is he has the platform and money to amplify his semi-drunk sounding, ignorant views ... how the mighty have fallen. RIP.
Can somebody provide an archive link? Trying to access the site, I get a Cloudflare security page that says my access has been blocked by some security rules.
if it wasn't for DHH, Ruby would be a hobby programming language at best. The community can say what it wants, but it and frankly, most of the web programmers in the world, owe DHH some thanks. If it weren't for him, Yehuda Katz and John Resig, 90% of the web would still be written with Perl, CGI and VBScript.
Owning a source code project doesn't entitle you to admin in the github organization it belongs to, so I don't get why this article keeps hammering that point. Ownership of rubygems doesn't matter as all that's changing is members of a github organization.
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.
>Sidekiq withdrew its $250,000/year sponsorship for Ruby Central
Whoa! I'm blown away that Sidekiq has enough money in the bank that one of their sponsorships is $250k/yr!
Sidekiq the company (actually ContribSys) is just one guy: Mike Perham.[0]
I listened to an interview with Mike a few years ago, and he seemed like he had an amazing setup. He was making about $1M/yr with no employees, just him selling code and contributing to open-source. I don't think he even has servers to keep online.
According to this podcast from 2023, he's now making close to $10M/yr in revenue and is still just running the whole thing by himself.[0] Great life for a solo dev founder!
[0] https://ruby.social/@getajobmike
[1] https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-661-...
Mike is salt of the earth, a wonderful man. The community is lucky to have him.
I also of course did not know the size of his donation, but it’s not that surprising. Especially since he didn’t advertise his reason for donating, or his reason for stopping (both of which are principled).
I can concur, I have spent some time with him IRL. He is one standup guy, and his ethics are inspiring.
Seconding this. No-nonsense, good dude. Shaking his hand was more of a personal goal than DHH.
Correct. Thank you for the kind words. If you want to support me, support Sidekiq and Faktory.
Sidekiq is the dream of the Indie developer. Useful and simple product, highly automated, mints money
This is a great account of "what."
I'm still struggling to understand the "why."
(That's not an implicit criticism of the article, which is extremely appreciated because it's neutral and factual)
I've been away from Ruby for a few years but Shopify always seemed like a huge net positive, sponsoring lots of valuable work on both Ruby and Rails. I never followed Ruby community happenings very closely but I'm not aware of negative feelings towards their community role in the past.
Plus one.
Reading through this, I’m not sure what the fear is of Shopify taking a larger role. They’ve been strong contributors to Ruby for a really long time. Not that I agree with the actions, but I can’t parse what nefarious motives they might have from this article.
Replace Shopfiy with Microsoft, Oracle or etc and surely you can see what worries people might have around a move like this. Just because a company has a positive imago does not mean that their motives align with that of the community.
Microsoft and Oracle sold closed source software that had obtained tremendous leverage in their fields, if not outright monopolies. Historically, Microsoft and Oracle’s business models were threatened by open source. They have reacted in various ways over decades: alternately resisting, embracing, or acquiring control of important projects.
However, Shopify sells SAAS thst runs on open source. What does it benefit them to take over key aspects of infrastructure?
If they disliked what was happening with the OSS tools, they are big and rich enough to maintain forks or their own toolchain.
The OP seems to be associating the start of this controversy with some feud between DHH and the founder of Sidekiq. Shopify is indeed quite aligned with DHH. And there’s some controversy about so-called supply chain attacks, which I understand might inspire a call for a more locked-down organization. But as an outsider I am confused.
There’s a lack of transparency playing out compounded by a poor job rolling out would should be the equivalent of boring corporate security bureaucracy.
Usually when this kind of stuff is rolled out, it’s agreed upon in some form and documented. Then when people are surprised, it’s a matter of pointing to the section in the doc that’s relevant and everybody goes on their way.
From the outside it appears this had none of that, so people are understandably surprised, sad, or angry. Since there’s a lack of transparency, people are filling in the blanks.
Totally on that one. Recently investments in homebrew almost turned it to be a paid tool.
I can totally see someone seizing the opportunity there. (And if you think it is a good idea, you are a terrible person)
I work for a small company who helps financially for ruby community, and they strongly advocate for other same size companies to do the same so there is balance.
It would be terrible for pypi, rubygems, brew and other repos to be used as political or economical tools.
Large companies can fork and keep living for a while or pay the cost. But for everyone else, including people developing ideas at home, it would be a shot through the heart.
So if you have a company that can help those orgs, press them to do so. If you have 5 USD to help, also do it. It makes the difference.
Aren't they a profit motivated company?
I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing. But it inevitably means they will not always be aligned.
Anon profit, or even a random person, has their own motivations too that will not be aligned. Linus was herding cats in the kernel back when few contributors were paid by corporations to do it. Anyone that has spent any time on a large-ish OSS project has seen bad maintainers with poor incentives, as seen from the outside
if there are contributors with various jobs it is very different than if the package is owned by a big for profit
It took a fair amount of reading between the lines, but here's what appears to have happened: 1) People and entities with partial control over RubyGems attempted to cancel DHH. 2) In response, elements aligned with DHH kicked the former out of RubyGems. 3) Everyone involved is now attempting to legitimize their motives as "good engineering."
In other words, "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die."
I think more accurate is this:
One person who was a major funder of RubyCentral pulled funding because they were upset at RubyCentral platforming DHH. Neither that person, nor RubyCentral, had control over or ownership of the RubyGems software at that time, though RubyCentral operated the rubygems.org service, which uses the RubyGems software.
The corporation that is the other major funder of RubyCentral (Shopify) responded to this (taking advantage of the fact that this left them the sole significant funder of RubyCentral whom RubyCentral could not afford to alienate) to direct RubyCentral to, without any plausible claim of right, seize control of the RubyGems software repos, and kick out anyone who wasn’t a full-time RubyCentral employee from them.
It’s not about DHH except that that indirectly provided the opportunity, it’s about Shopify seeking to consolidate control of core Ruby infrastructure.
When I choose to pull funding for an organization that makes decisions I disagree with, I'm exercising my discretion to spend my own money in the ways I see fit.
When you do that, you're cancelling someone. That's the difference.
DHH is on the board of directors at Shopify.
> One person who was a major funder of RubyCentral pulled funding because they were upset at RubyCentral platforming DHH
Yes. To de-obfuscate, they sent a message that he should be cancelled. It backfired spectacularly, as it rightfully should have. Good.
No. DHH is on the board of Shopify.
Thank you, this explains it for me. The situation is still stupid tough...
Yeah, it's a bad scene, the Ruby community isn't nearly big enough to sustain major fractures.
I don't really think this is what happened. Seems pretty straightforward: Shopify wants to decide not just who runs RubyGems.org, but also the RubyGems repos. Separate teams (well, formerly)
> 1) People and entities with partial control over RubyGems attempted to cancel DHH
Ok there it is. That would explain why they’re being so cagey. I thought there had to more to this.
Nah, DHH has too much power and authority to be "cancelled". One person pulled his donations - a very generous continuous gift - because he didn't want to fund Ruby Central if they continued to platform bigotry.
Ruby Central screwed themselves by relying on basically two large donors for their funding, and then offended one of those two donors.
Many people trying to cancel him is still a "cancel campaign" in my book. Just a failed one. IMO, it's pretty similar to the last cancel campaign against DHH & his associates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42593223
This is a hell of a way to find out DHH is on the anti-DEI wagon.
The term "canceled" seriously needs to be retired.
If I understand correctly, Sidekiq's owner pulled his funding from Ruby Central because of his concerns with DHH. That's... one person.
Of course, many dislike DHH's views. Others like him more for his views. He is outspoken about controversial topics. Obviously this garners him fans, and detractors. Using terms like "canceled" is deeply useless at best.
Cancelling DHH would be a stupid kneejerk reaction given how much of a major part of Ruby’s story is thanks to 37 Signals and their community involvement, including but not limited to Rails.
If this is the reason, I am behind this takeover. It’s weeding out bad actors that have a shortsighted mentality.
I do not want RubyGems and Bundler to become yet another pair of ideological playgrounds for people that spend more time protesting unrelated causes than actually _writing and developing software_.
I agree, on the other hand, financially supporting someone that you fundamentally agree with the principles is also not doable.
This is all a callout for people to step in and really help open source and free software before it is too late.
It can be by doing work, participating of the discussions, helping reviewing costs and expenses or even money.
This will certainly trigger the heads of evil dudes in suits and it will become a darker scenario.
Unfortunately, and very unfortunately, the world that Stallman predicted is here and we are late to start pushing back.
We are finding out how capital corrodes ethical conduct
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
The "what" seems to be purely a reaction to this article DHH posted: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
Apparently, the reason is having an incorrect opinion.
This article is just so politically charged and opinionated that it is hard to believe that it is coming on a "tech blog". Not to mention, a while back the very same company wanted its employees to have no political discussions at workplace in a widely published article.
It's not a tech blog, it's his personal blog, and it's quite in line with that company post previously; advocate for whatever policies you want on your own time and platform but not on the company's, and since this is his personal blog, he is doing exactly that.
world.hey.com/dhh is not just "a personal blog" as it is simultaneously where he posts everything he wants to publish about his professional work, and sometimes it's literally the official updates on the software he maintains such as Turbo.
If you're an employee at some company you can post about your own work too on your own blog. The fact that he maintains the hosting platform as well doesn't mean much, 37Signals employees can post on Medium or some other blog host too.
If I post something on my personal blog, and it's against the company's Code of Conduct, then I'm in trouble with HR. If I'm the company's CEO, then I'm in trouble with the board. You're not an island.
Then you'll just have to be a CEO with a platform. And if it's on your personal blog, I don't see why you'd be in trouble with HR at any good company, unless they're monitoring your communications.
It’s published on hey.com, which is a 37Signals product.
Also it’s sort of hard to separate the guy who offers his opinions on his blog and the same guy who offers his opinions at a tech conference.
There's plenty to criticize DHH for but to be fair world.hey.com is a feature of the email platform that lets you easily post a blog. He's using his own software/platform and I realize the optics, but you could post your own thoughts at world.hey.com/muglug too.
Not if you are a Basecamp employee who needs their job and disagrees with DHH.
Benefit of being one of the owners/cofounders. If you don’t like your bosses’s opinions, you are free to work somewhere else.
Benefit of being one of the owners/cofounders of Sidekiq: if you don't like DHH's shitty opinions, you are free to pull your very generous donation from Ruby Central and send the money somewhere else.
It's on hey.com domain, which is part of his company.
So what? He can prefer his own hosting platform he owns, it doesn't mean other employees can't post on there or even a different platform.
world.hey.com is their personal blogging space. Every user gets a page at world.hey.com/username
The victim mindset of these people is on another level. DHH presents the openly transphobic Graham Linehan as some kind of free speech victim.
Oh, I should read the actual tweet? Funny the actual tweet is so much worse than I imagined.
If a trans-women is in a space that she is legally entitled to be in, according to him one should:
> Make, a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him[he means the trans-women] in the balls
He is literally telling people to be violent against trans people. And then cries when actions have consequences.
These people are like the school yard bully who will start a fight with you then cry "timeout, timeout" when you punch back. And go to the teacher to convince you they are the real victim.
I was actually shocked he included those tweets as if they were incredibly benign. I now believe this is an intentional move on his part. He knows the tweets are crazy incendiary, he just wants to filter out the audience early. This trend of catering to far right fan boys while maintaining plausible deniability is happening everywhere.
Its tge intent of the far right to always double down on the banality of hate. Its essentially a psychological martingale problem.
> DHH presents the openly transphobic Graham Linehan as some kind of free speech victim.
The thing about free speech is that it's only relevant if someone with power hates what you say.
See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/52416-the-trouble-with-figh...
disingenuous.
even before, during and after the fascist protest he is celebrating (as an immigrant in america, telling about his daydreaming on being an immigrant in the UK), there have been arrests for people simply saying "killing children is wrong" all over london.
yet he could not pick any of those arests for his example. yeah, it's plain and simple white supremacists. get over it.
I don't know why everyone pretends that having an incorrect opinion is some untouchable thing and we just have to respect it.
Everyone, you included, has opinions that they find unpalatable. Pretty much all of human history has been "cancelling" people for "incorrect opinions". I mean, what were the crusades? Or world war II?
There's no, like, gun to your head saying you have to respect things you don't respect. Some things are just not respectable. You're allowed to be like "no" and then decide to get as far away from the person as possible.
And, relatedly - you don't have to run away. You can push them away.
Its not really fair that crazy people are allowed to say crazy things then we, normal people, have to take the high ground and walk away. What if I don't want to walk away? Why do I have to leave a project like it's the plague because you said something insane?
Anyway, just my two cents.
Also, just to be clear: I don't think DHH is crazy or evil. I'm addressed the broader concept, not this specific case.
> Its not really fair that crazy people are allowed to say crazy things then we, normal people, have to take the high ground and walk away. What if I don't want to walk away? Why do I have to leave a project like it's the plague because you said something insane?
This takes as axiomatic that people with incompatible beliefs in one area cannot work together in a different area.
I really like that my job has me working with lots of different people from lots of walks of life, and we are too busy saving lives to think too much about politics.
However, if I found out that one of the physicians I work with doesn't think I should have a job, doesn't think I should have equal rights, and doesn't think I belong in public spaces, then politics would become unavoidable. I'm not going to work for a bigot who sees me as a second class citizen.
Likewise there are a number of long-term Ruby OS contributors who belong to minority groups DHH has been attacking. Would you attend Railsconf if DHH called your ethnicity gangs of rapists, like he recently has?
They can, but it really depends on the belief. Even for you or the most principled person, there is a limit.
And, even if you can, it doesn't mean it's pleasant.
Its one thing if someone is horrible in silent. From experience, horrible people seem to be the most confident and outspoken. Maybe there's a common character flaw that underpins both behaviors.
> This takes as axiomatic that people with incompatible beliefs in one area cannot work together in a different area.
"Beliefs" are when you think The Strokes are superior to The White Stripes, or that Giordano's deep dish pizza is superior to Lou Malnati's, or that IPAs are better than lagers. I'll happily work with people who espouse those beliefs, despite my beliefs to the contrary.
I won't work with people who describe a Tommy Robinson march as "heartwarming", or who use terms like "demographic nightmare" [1] to describe immigration, or who amplify repeatedly-debunked [2] claims of "Pakistani rape gangs", all of which DHH did. That's bigotry, not beliefs.
British culture isn't being eroded by immigration. It's being shaped by it, just like it has been for thousands of years. Where do you think your culture came from- thin air?!?
- Romans gave Britain roads, baths, and Christianity.
- Anglo-Saxons gave Britain Old English.
- Vikings gave Britain laws and half its place names.
- Normans made French the language of power and fused it with English.
- The Crusades brought new foods, science, and art.
And so on and so on.
It's the height of ignorance to look at that incredibly diverse history, and then say "OK, but right now is the moment in time where we 'lock in' our culture for the rest of time." Culture has never stood still, and no one, not even DHH, gets to freeze it in place. Well, they can try, but they'll be pissing in the wind, just like the Tommy Robinson marchers were.
I'll just leave this here: the folks in this Instagram reel [3], wearing the St. George's Cross flag and clearly on their way to the march, decided to stop and get a curry first. With the caption "When you're on your way to the racist march but the immigrant food is popping."
1. https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
2. https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
3. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOlJ_JAiKTG/
> ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’
Basically any pizza is better than Lou's though :)
Be very careful about your next few words. ;-)
Yeah, so let's look at what's going on here. DHH is working to promote the work of notorious white supremacists including Tommy Robinson.
Say you find out that your dentist is into Qanon. Do you:
a) Nod politely and try to change the subject?
b) Tell him you think he’s nuts and you prefer not to discuss politics with him?
c) Find a different dentist because this makes you uncomfortable and you’re not sure you can trust his judgement?
d) Tell your friends that this dentist has some weird political views, and here’s a new dentist you found that you like?
e) Start a pressure campaign to shame anyone who still goes to this dentist?
Because I think everything except the last one would be a fair reaction, but I can’t ever tell which one people are talking about.
The phrasing here is strange - whats the difference between a pressure campaign and me telling my friends?
What if I have a lot of friends? Is it now a pressure campaign?
What makes something telling the truth, and what makes something a campaign?
And, why do people so thoroughly fear the truth being told about them? Is that shame, or something else?
If you wish privacy, as we all do often, then stay private. Its easy and free.
But when your opinion is posted online and you willingly tie it to your real life identity, you cannot get canceled. No, in my mind, it's impossible.
You may cancel yourself. But people simply repeating your own words back to you is not a campaign, it's just a reminder of reality and truth.
The "pressure campaign" being one guy who decided to withdraw his contribution. Was Mike Perham obligated to publicly associate with DHH indefinitely?
I can’t comment on the decisions people made in this case, I was taking up GP’s musings on who we should let have what opinions in general.
I guess I would say that withdrawing funding from an organization based on who they let speak at an event seems like an overreaction given that it had these ramifications, but I don’t think it’s my place to judge what anyone chooses to contribute their own money to. None of the rest of us is contributing $250k to Ruby Central either, and we’re not entitled to have Mike solve our problems.
>I guess I would say that withdrawing funding from an organization based on who they let speak at an event seems like an overreaction given that it had these ramifications
Wait wait wait, now it's Mike's fault that Shopify acted the way it did and coup'd this organization? Come on. You can't judge his choice to remove funding on what someone else did.
Basically, it is ok for bigots like DHH to spread their opinions and to try to push away or harm people they dont like.
But, if you push back or criticise them, that is something wrong. The harm can go only one way - from bigots to the rest of us. But other way round, once you funded bigots you have to continue with it.
As far as I can tell, the direct chain of events preceding this coup-like event was:
Ruby Central hosts DHH at RailsConf in July --> Sidekiq withdraws funding from Ruby Central --> Ruby Central is essentially entirely dependent on Shopify.
Strictly speaking, DHH's September blog post could not have driven this unless there was a time machine involved. However, DHH has made some contentious political statements in the past so perhaps what you're saying is true in a larger sense.It's certainly possible that Shopify's actions had nothing to do with either side's politics in particular, and they decided it was simply safer for them to control Ruby Cental and RubyGems rather than rely on an independent organization with unstable funding (that they were basically solely funding anyway according to the article)
I don't love that outcome. As a Ruby fan, I don't want Ruby or bits of its infrastructure controlled by a particular organization.
Ruby Central [announces that it will] hosts DHH at RailsConf [6 weeks before the event is due to happen, when it's too late for people to refund their conference tickets and plane tickets too] in July 2025.
A dick move.
He's been posting controversial stuff for quite a while, you certainly can't distill this to one blog post.
DHH stopped trying to cultivate an inclusive community some time ago. The ruby community can ill afford to drive away more prominent maintainers, yet that is what is happening here, as the corporate interests are aligned with DHH even if the rest of the community is not.
The ruby community has been putting up with DHH's behavior for 20 years [1]. He's just become worse and more of an outspoken bigot lately.
[1] https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/dhh-says-f-you/57797
Speaking of incorrect opinions, it's pretty hard not to read this and conclude his "no politics at work" initiative was just him seeing his company was full of liberals he found annoying and this was his scheme to kick them all out.
This makes no sense. He never said employees couldn't discuss politics outside of work through personal channels.
If DHH had genuinely progressive instincts, he would likely have been more even-handed. He could have credibly said: “look, I’m personally left-leaning, but I want work to stay apolitical for everyone’s sanity”
Instead, the intensity of his crackdown, coupled with later statements aligning him with reactionary causes, strongly suggests his “neutrality” was in practice a shield against progressive causes inside Basecamp.
Is it unfair that you can only impose a “no politics” rule without backlash if you’re progressive? Maybe a little. But the asymmetry is baked in: progressives are the ones challenging the status quo, so banning politics almost always protects the status quo and silences the challengers. And in this case, his later positions confirmed that he wasn’t neutral at all, he wasn’t on the side of the people he’d told to leave.
So he is a Tommy Robinson fan? Yikes.
He literally just uses his actions as an example if you read the article properly.
Fascinating that all of his examples of free speech seem to involve white nationalists.
It’s pretty galling to see someone who’s never lived in London talk mad shit about it. London is my home, not DHH’s. He knows fuck all, which is why he repeats tired, overcooked falsehoods.
What he’s saying is that he only considers white British to be legitimately British. He would look at former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and current Mayor Sadiq Khan and dismiss them as insufficiently British. Too much melanin I guess.
He’s even excluded white people from elsewhere who were born in Britain if they have a non-British ancestor. So according to DHH and his ilk Nigel Farage’s children wouldn’t be counted as white British despite having white mothers (Irish and German), being born to a British father in Britain and living all their lives in Britain.
What the fuck is the point of dividing people like this? “Just an opinion” my ass. DHH and people like him are dehumanising my fellow Londoners.
It sure sounds like simple white supremacy
I actually accidentally walked into that protest while doing touristy stuff in London that weekend (yeah, great weekend to choose) and first it looked weird having all those people waving British and English flags walking around.... and then I noticed many wore shirts with "Make Britain White Again" (sic) slogans and unironically wearing "Make Britain Great Again" hats. Whatever that thing was, it was about as peaceful as "Truth Rallies" Milošević organized before the whole 1990s war in Balkans went down.
DHH seems outright delusional in that post.
It's just another example of someone straying outside of their sphere(s) of expertise ... there are some excellent examples to the contrary, but fuck you money tends to tempt those with weak characters into these situations.
Incredibly sad to watch. He literally has no idea what he's talking about.
As a visitor, London was absolutely lovely. I felt hands-down safer on its streets than the streets of my home city, for what it's worth.
Plus, hell of a good ramen shop near the West End.
My girlfriend witnessed a robbery in London's city center ~2 weeks ago, in the second day of our visit. After that, we saw a homeless guy pooping on a wall; some of them screaming at others.
I didn't feel like I was personally in danger, but I'm also a guy who's lived next to American slums.
Basically every Western major city is becoming like this.
I almost had my MacBook stolen out of my backpack from me in London (Shoreditch) a few years in broad daylight - by a black person that didn't even speak English during the attempted robbery.
I'm from Africa so I'm born with the instincts that luckily prevented me from losing anything or getting hurt.
I was just visiting the UK for 3 weeks, but that gave me a perspective how bad immigration laws can turn it into something out of control.
Why does a place like Singapore, where 48% of its workforce are immigrants / expats - not have this problem.
It remains the safest place on Earth.
To add to your anecdata, had you visited London during the time of Dickens you would have had your possessions thieved by a charming raffish urchin that spoke English in a dialect you also wouldn't have understood.
True, but at least it would have been by a Brit in a Brit's country.
Point is, if you immigrate, you assimilate best you can with current "native" society.
You'd prefer if your immigrant MacGuffin had nailed your head to the floor like Dinsdale Piranha or the Kray brothers?
Maybe done you over with blunt instruments and broken glass like a couple of 'scouse trainspotters?
Traditional native British violence then, none of that soft foreign stuff?
You're wise to consign such thoughts to a meconium account.
Ippudo? Bone Daddies?
Kanada-Ya. Small and worth the wait.
It sounds like a mix of good intentions, misunderstandings, and poor communication.
Shopify wanted to put in place better goverance and access control, to reduce the risk of a supply chain attack and put a deadline on that.
Part time maintenaners left it to the last minute, didn't consult or communicate well and then over exerted their influence by taking over things without consensus to do so.
Existing maintainers then rightfully alarmed, when it all could probably have been handled better.
Doesn't help that the rift over a competing tool being created probably played a part in some of the heavy handedness. DHH's drift to white supremacy probably hasn't helped either, but likely neither are the cause here.
I don't know about this interpretation. The blog post points out that one of the conditions of the continued funding by Shopify was literally removing one of the specific maintainers of the stolen tooling who had been working on it them for a decade, and it provided ample evidence that this was funding that essentially was the only thing keeping the service afloat. It's kind of hard to imagine threatening to sink the entire RubyGems service unless the people in charge of it steal ownership of a related but separately owned tool to force out one specific person as "good intentions" but with "poor communication" when it's presented the way it has been by the perpetrators.
To preempt any potential objections on the basis of the removed funding from Sidekiq based similarly on a relationship with a single person, there are two pretty crucial differences: the funding was withdrawn because of the relationship the organization had itself with someone, rather than someone involved with something that literally had to be stolen to terminate their involvement, and the funding withdrawn by Sidekiq was done openly with umambiguously communicated intentions. Deciding to not give money to an organization because of an actual choice that they made and tell everyone that is just being transparent about your morals; secretively pressuring an organization to exploit their existing connections to force someone out of a project they don't own and then having them represent it publicly as something they chose to do on their own for the greater good might as well be out of the playbook of organized crime or foreign intelligence services.
> To strengthen supply chain security, we are taking important steps to ensure that administrative access to the RubyGems.org, RubyGems, and Bundler is securely managed.
Ridiculously bold to say when what happened here was literally a malicious supply chain attack.
Malicious how? Was malicious code inserted? Serious question.
Status quo administrators had their access revoked without their consent and without cause. That's malice.
It's more like a hostile takeover
That sounds more like "unfair" or "theft", not malice. Malice implies some kind of intent to harm or injure.
If money makes them do things like this, what's stopping them from bundling Bonzi Buddy if Shopify is bought out by PE and starts cutting funding to "useless" stuff? (Yes, it's a hyperbolic example)
I wasn't expecting such a nice writeup. Worth a read.
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.
I've never written a line of Ruby in my life so this is coming from an outsiders perspective, but after this I don't know how anyone ever works with these people again. I would think the entire community would start finding ways to migrate away. Presumably those repos can be forked, and it sounds like a new source of Gems can be hosted. I doubt it would be easy by any stretch of the imagination, but essentially this entire leadership team just showed themselves to be entirely untrustworthy.
Spinel's "rv" seems to be just that—obviating Ruby Central.
How has it been “eating itself alive”?
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
I wrote a book on Merb and was an active contributor. Before that I had developed several apps with Rails.
That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition and I don't view the Rails vs Merb period as itself having been problematic.
Merb devs believed we could make app development both simple to start (as a single file like Sinatra) and easy to evolve (into a modular codebase with Rails-like conventions). Existing outside of the Rails ecosystem allowed Merb to pursue that distinct vision.
The Merge between Rails and Merb, accreted many of Merb's modular architectural enhancements to Rails, but sadly deprecated the overall Merb vision. To me that was a shame, but I still wouldn't describe any of it as toxic.
> I wrote a book on Merb and was an active contributor.
It might be a situation where you see it differently because you were involved or benefiting from the way things unfolded
> That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition [...] wouldn't describe any of it as toxic
Competition can be healthy, Rails vs Merb was anything but. Quotes from Yehuda himself:
••• "I was just so blinded by tribalism that I never even bothered to check how fundamental the disagreements really were."
••• "waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy"
••• "It's so easy for our brains to turn disagreements about priorities into value conflicts. It takes a lot of effort to see past that mistake."
https://yehudakatz.com/2020/02/19/together-the-merb-story/
Engine Yard's management took several strategic missteps over the years. One of them was stifling Merb. The quotes from Yehuda describe his difficulty in making the best of a forced merger.
Ezra's vision for Merb and DHH's vision for Rails were distinct. Both warranted development. Over time, I assume they would have collectively strengthened the Ruby community. It was a mistake for Engine Yard's management to have instead framed it as zero sum and forced a merger.
Your arguments that this was all just normal competition does not stand up to scrutiny
Discussing Engine Yard now does not seem fruitful if you do not address the quotes provided by Katz which refute your own prior comments
Ezra was such a good guy. DHH...
There’s been a ton of that, yes, but for most people who are building applications and websites with Ruby, it’s been stable, productive, and prosperous.
> How has it been “eating itself alive”?
> 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.
No, I'm saying there's a lot of people who won't even know this happened. Fewer will know that it happened, but they'll view it as a scenario where the ends justify the means.
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.
> No, I'm saying there's a lot of people who won't even know this happened.
In the world of "I'm sorry to that man" this seems like a given about literally everything.
Not knowing something happened is called being uninformed, and it doesn't change things or make the person right just because they don't know about something that occurred.
> There will be a lot of amazing Rubyists that leave
We agree. Listen, WebObjects still has a somewhat active community. Ruby's community won't be helped by recent events, but recent events happened because the Ruby community has been backstabby for a long time and no one has stopped it because there's too much money to be made in the meantime to care about things like people.
>Ruby will be lucky to have a shadow of the community left after this.
Maybe? This feels like an extreme statement with too much certainty at this point.
Ruby's status of having, like, two companies that are big and known to use Ruby (Shopify and 37Signals) is the reason why this was allowed to happen (three if you include Github, but my understanding is that its used less-and-less there). I have doubts that anyone could name another company or group most people have heard of using Ruby in any significant capacity. Its a dying language that does not have the legs to survive this drama.
Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Zendesk, Kickstarter, Mastodon, and if I remember right Coinbase was originally Rails as well.
Many if not all of these companies are, to my knowledge, companies like Github which might still have some legacy parts of their system running Ruby, but aren't building significant new code in Ruby; and if they do have Ruby, are trying to reduce its prevalence in their system.
You're badly misinformed (or are intentionally spreading misinformation).
I can vouch for at least one of those companies especially if we go by the "trying" bit of the GP.
Your claim would have more standing if 1) it made sense vs. the news and recent yearslong turn away from Ruby development, and 2) if you included any sources or information other than "nuh uh"
Square was originally a single RoR monolith. We spent a decade burning it to the ground with a Java and Go microservice architecture.
Some product surface area remains Ruby, but Ruby was chased away by most teams.
Square brought in a lot of Xooglers over the years to lead the transition, so you see a lot of Google tech: protobufs, gRPCs, at one point a pre-Kubernetes Borg clone, etc.
GitLab too: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab
Twitter also
Twitter famously eliminated as much ruby as practical from their codebase.
Had to kill the failwhale.
> the vitriol directed at early critics like Zed Shaw
Zed was also a source of vitriol and toxicity, not just a target
DHH aside, most of this drama was over a decade ago.
"Actually, the Ruby community ripped itself apart a decade ago and has never changed and still suffering from the consequences except with the recent thing with the founder" is not a strong argument
No, but listing things that happened over the course of over a decade, some of which are well resolved and others (like why’s leaving) are questionable how they’re an indication of drama.
He left public programming, including Scratch, entirely.
> things that happened over the course of over a decade
Bad things happening to contributors year after year for a decade shows a toxic community that doesn't change even over a long period of time
The latest harm is just the continuation of what has been happening since the beginning
> some of which are well resolved
Resolved? Decisions were made, but the tensions were never resolved and people were hurt.
> He left public programming [...] entirely.
Yeah. That's what happens when someone is destroyed after years of their hard work is treated like nothing.
Ha yep. I remember a lot of this drama from my early days working with rails. But my impression is that none of this mattered and has long been water under the bridge. (I didn't know until reading about this current episode that there is new DHH drama.)
_why's departure had nothing to do with the Ruby community, as far as we know (unless some new info has come to light recently)
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
If you don't realize the overlap in the Rails and Ruby on Rails community, I'm not sure what corner of the Ruby world you've been hiding in.
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.
I'm not dismissing the problems of the past. I just don't think they were as big problems as you make them out to be. It's not like I wasn't around or unaware, I just didn't let it bother me - and was happy with how things were developing despite some arguments around the fringes as in any community.
> I'm not sure what corner of the Ruby world you've been hiding in.
I did say that I haven't been involved for the past dozen years. Before that I was definitely there when Rails burst onto the Ruby scene and its early years. I realize the overlap but they were still pretty distinct -- though maybe that's changed in the past decade.
"it didn't affect me so I didn't care" is a common and valid feeling up until you are aware of what is happening
I developed with Ruby from the beginning and loved Ruby on Rails for many reasons. The community's backstabbing nature and callousness toward people who put a lot of work in was not something I ever admired and it's led us here.
You’ve made a lot of comments in this thread, and they come across far more subjective than objective. For people who have just been getting along and making things, they’re unlikely to be all that persuasive.
Someone violating MINASWAN to out _why? _why deliberately kept himself anonymous.
You won't have heard of the rest, they'll have quietly moved on to other languages.
If the current state of Ruby is "eating itself alive" then I hope it stays hungry.
How is this good for anyone? Ruby is an excellent language and the community is largely the best I’ve experienced of any language.
Yes there is drama, recently especially, but there have been some fantastic people involved for decades
I should have expanded my response, as I'm happy with the current state of Ruby, and my comment was a poorly executed attempt at sarcasm. :-)
There's ruby the tech and there's ruby the community.
The former is mature, robust, fit for purpose.
The latter is... messy.
DHH's prominent role in the ecosystem and full throated endorsement of reactionary politics has alienated a lot of people who might otherwise have been invested in that community, and this latest maneuvering seems downstream of all that.
At this point the tension between corporate interests (and by extension DHH, who is a central player in that group) and open source / community interests has become frustratingly high, and it all seems like it could have been avoided.
It doesn't mean ruby is dead or even dying, but you can't blame anybody for looking at this and just noping right out over to a community without such drama.
What'd Ruby do to you?
I should have expanded my response, as I'm happy with the current state of Ruby, and my comment was a poorly executed attempt at sarcasm. :-)
I don't know anything about Ruby so forgive my ignorance. As I understand it there were repos required to run the RubyGems Service. This was of interest to major corporate players. Instead of removing the original authors, why didn't they just fork the requirements?
And wouldn't that constitute a violation of ownership? Or did the authors wave that away by joining the respective GitHub org in the first place?
Basically, yes.
It is murkier as the involvement of some of the original creators in Ruby Central is there, so there are claims to being the original copyright holder applicable to some areas by a very small number of individuals, none of which who are the newly added maintainers, or Ruby Central as a whole entity.
> The Ruby community has been eating itself alive since almost the beginning,
that's an unfair take; the Ruby community was excellent at the beginning
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.
I was there too - I didn't "miss a lot", I just ignored it. The community was still vibrant, helpful, and the language/tools were developing nicely. So some people with big egos (ZS, DHH etc.) were causing waves. Who cares. I don't get swept up in that sort of thing. Not letting it affect you is different from not being aware of it, it just means not getting involved with it.
I'm still very happy with Ruby itself, and how it's developed, and Rails too. While I haven't used it professionally in a while, it's still the language I most enjoy working in. I also used it to get my daughter (now finished college and working as a SWE) into programming when she was a child, and currently using it to introduce my 9 yr old son to coding.
> I didn't "miss a lot", I just ignored it.
Yes, so did many others and now it has blown up.
> Who cares.
I think Ellen Dash, André Arko, Samuel Giddins, Martin Emde, and even Mike McQuaid could be proposed as individuals who care. In addition to the hundreds of people commenting here.
> While I haven't used it professionally in a while, it's still the language I most enjoy working in.
Perhaps now that you're up to date on some important issues in the Ruby community, you can get involved and help right the ship so the language you love will exist in a few years.
Your last point is a fair one. Maybe I should.
I don't really want to continue debating the other points, but I will say one last thing. There's a difference between caring about the language/ecosystem/community, and caring about the drama introduced by certain individuals. I care very much about the former, and I believe the latter to be an unhelpful distraction rather than something to be "solved". But that's just me.
And just to clarify: when I say "who cares", I was talking about some of this drama in the past, egos and whatnot. I am _not_ talking about what just happened now with RubyCentral. I consider that to be a serious problem with real-world consequences that go beyond disputes/differences of opinions. It's no way to handle OSS and treat maintainers. It does put a bad stain on RubyCentral, which is unfortunate.
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.
It's true Ruby Central was a fiasco and the maintainers should have been treated better. But the author's investigation misses important elements like the "culture war" on both sides. That seems to be prime motivation for everyone involved, given the flames raging in the comments below.
Your critique of the author's writing style doesn't seem like your strongest argument.
> 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? Treated better as in... not kicked out of things they built by someone else who has something to gain?
Treated better is not the phrase to describe what should have happened here.
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.
Why were Samuel Giddins and André Arko singled out to be removed? What was their transgressions and to whom? From the write-up it sounds like Shopify wanted them out, but why?
The article has a section about something that might be related: https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/#rv
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.
You left out the really gross quote from Rafael França: "I’m not so sure I trust them to not sabotage rubygems or bundler." I'm not eager to work with a community with leaders who say things like that in it. Imagine spending years volunteering work that helps a company like Shopify only to have someone malign your work like that.
I didn't understand why anyone would think that way. Python has new package management/build tools all the time and to my knowledge there's no drama about it, other then the normal dev arguments over which tools are best.
I'm reconsidering my opinion of Rafael considering the trajectory of DHH's rhetoric, and that Rafael has stayed in support of DHH throughout this time while many others have publicly called him out. Concerning.
At some point the majority will learn that no matter the public messaging most large companies will do what benefits their incumbency over what is best for the industry or customers.
This, here, is the right answer. Pity it's so far down in the comments.
Capital does what is good for capital. What is good for capital will inevitably deviate from what is good for a community.
Apropos of your point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid
It’s worth noting the weren’t the only ones signaled out. At least one maintainer who had worked closely with them, but not been involved in RV also got tarred with the “too involved with André or too politically similar”
It’s also worth nothing that DHH has moved against André before, via organizing a letter to his Board. In addition to any personal dispute and radically different politics (André is about as left as DHH is right in labor issues) there is how that’s played out in funding open source. André founded RubyTogether as a trade guild and DHH seemed to disapprove of rubygems/bundler maintainers getting paid directly by community support like that. I do not know if a black trans woman getting paid was part of what DHH was against or if she was collateral damage in his move.
André annd another maintainer worked (and a designer), together through my company on rubygems stuff for RC, at a great discount. Mostly we tried to structure it so they kept getting paid enough for to cover health insurance for their families, etc, while mostly rolling our company down.
It’s hard not to read it as “people who worked closely with André, whether or not they were going to work on RV, were targeted”. I think the fact that I am also a trans woman is bores coincidental, even given DHH’s politics. I don’t think he even remembers who I am and I don’t we mostly a tangential factor in any of this.
> they had a problem with Ruby Central taking control of the RubyGems open source code repositories and gems, which Ruby Central never owned.
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?
I said in the post that HSBT who was a maintainer invited Marty as an owner of the GitHub account. This was against the wishes of the other maintainers who had established practices for adding new maintainers.
So HSBT was the owner? And transfered ownership?
HSBT was a maintainer who had "owner" permissions on GitHub.
It would seem that HSBT being a maintainer owner AND shopify employee faced a significant conflict of interest. Also I don’t think it’s a stretch given the context and clear direction coming from shopify for the actions of others to assume that HSBT themselves were directed by their employer to add Marty as an owner.
I sense there’s legal grounds here but can’t fully articulate what the legal case would be.
hsbt (no caps) isn’t a Shopify employee.
He’s one of the most active Japanese Ruby core committer, employed by ANPAD, and also part time contractor for Ruby Central, and one of the most active committers to rubygems/bundler.
BTW, ANPAD inc is a construction company, the site is in japanese but the opening movie alone gives a good idea of the context they operate in:
https://andpad.co.jp/
It's funny how far removed it is to all of this drama.
That is explained in the "On 9 September, HSBT ..." paragraph, which describes how an existing RubyGems maintainer did - and then undid (most) - changes. A new user remained as an owner of the RubyGems GitHub organization - which allowed Ruby Central to do things later.
It looks like all these Ruby package maintainers decided to, for the sake of convenience perhaps, keep their primary repos under a single 'Ruby Gems' GitHub org. That's what allowed Ruby Central to kick them out and take control of all the repos.
It sounds like RubyGems was renamed to Ruby Central.
At the GitHub Enterprise level, you can see that reflected if you look at any of the users profiles https://github.com/mghaught
Related. Others? (most recent first:)
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)
Maybe just don’t be part of a GitHub organization that can take over your shit if you don’t want them to. We really need a GitHub feature where maintainers can enter an organization but still retain ultimate control over their repository and take it back out if they start being annoying.
Maintainers could also use that to distrupt things in the same way, to be fair.
A two-key-rule system would be neat. A repo can be in an org, but some big changes (removing/adding a maintainer, moving a repo, renaming an org, etc) need to have x of total maintainer accounts click an approve button within a few days of each other. Making big changes slow and tedious feels ideal when we're talking about the countless lifehours sunk into a project by maintainers, that's funded and supported by a company. Both of those parties benefit from cooling off periods and being a bit obstinant to eachother... without being able to slit eachothers throats.
I understand Ruby Central doesn't own the source code, it's open source, and that they own the service, but who owned the GitHub account/repo ? Who created it originally?
The same people who created ruby central write the first versions of rubygems iirc (David Black , Chad Fowlernetc). But that was a long time ago and I'm not sure it matters to the current kerfuffle.
> and I'm not sure it matters to the current kerfuffle
I guess I find it a bit strange that it's so fuzzy who owned the GitHub repo.
So it was owned by a GitHub organization, and someone should have owned that organization no? Maybe the person that created it initially?
You can have more than one person with a role that allows to change ownership of repos owned by an organization, was that the situation here? Did multiple people had that permission and one of them re-owned the repo to themselves without any other knowing?
I say that because, I don't normally consider every code contributor to a repo, or even admin the owner of a repo.
If I create an open source lib, and then create a GitHub repo for it, and contributors come in, to help commit code, do PRs and even manage the repo, and later I decide to revoke everyone else's access, as the owner, like it's fine. Sure maybe some of the admins might wonder what's up, why I don't trust them administering the repo anymore, but it's my repo.
Here I'm struggling to identify whose repo is it? And was the repo owner kicked out of their own repo, so this is a takeover? Or did the owner just kick out others ?
> David Black
now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! he was definitely one of the prominent people keeping the ruby mailing list fun and friendly back in the day; I miss that early ruby era where everyone was enthusiastic about how nice the language felt to use.
Yep. I think he retired in the late 00's. Lovely guy.
I wonder if rv will come up with a good packaging story. I maintain one (small, single-author, and not at all popular) gem, and I'm very disinclined to push any new updates to ruby central, but since it's an end-user app I'll be looking for a good language-agnostic way to provide a downloadable version.
This move would make me vary of building on any ecosystem that has too few funders on it. At least if they are call themselves open source communities. If platform is owned by single player from start rules are clear.
But if there is only few funding it might come back to bite me. So maybe such cases are bad technology choices. Even if one is not malicious now, it does not tell about future or any decisions they might force through.
I get that when drama unfolds like this there is going to be a shake out. It's always valuable, to some degree, to know what happened and why.
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.
Part of the long term supply chain question is that you trust who’s in charge. This corporate takeover of Ruby central and now Ruby gems is deeply concerning for the state of the Ruby ecosystem.
Meanwhile the Ruby core team is in Japan, would you like them to report in for work orders to shopify too?
> know and trust that our supply chain is safe and can be trusted.
I'd actually think stuff like that recent npm worm would be a bigger danger than whatever this mess is?
> Sidekiq withdrew its $250,000/year sponsorship for Ruby Central because they platformed DHH at RailsConf 2025.
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?
Tom Stuart gave a really good lightning talk about this a decade ago, which is very respectful and has aged well https://tomstu.art/the-dhh-problem
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.
I got into Ruby and the community in 2006.
I aspired to be like Jim. We all should.
He made time for anyone who wanted to engage him in a sincere discussion. He helped a lot of newer people. He wrote beautiful tools that we still use.
He embodied MINASWAN. That has been the core of Ruby's community.
DHH has been pretty damn far from that.
Did many of us find Ruby through Rails? Sure. Does that mean that Ruby should be stewarded by someone who is intolerant and therefore exclusionary? No.
That's the opposite of MINASWAN.
> 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 ?
He is not stupid enough to say that directly bit it's one google away to find stuff like.
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...
Yeah, how about the one where he says Tommy Robinson was right? https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
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.
> 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
Yes, but you don't really need to worry, because those things aren't a real threat to you. Imagine if you were a member of a minority group making up 1% of the population, with a government actively persecuting you.
Is DHH part of the government, one that is actively persecuting a minority? If not, then you're talking about someone who is not in power and not persecuting a minority (or anyone). How is that relevant?
Unfortunately, in the current political climate the stakes are much higher.
Supporting people that want to and are pushing for the government to kill you and your loved ones seems like such an odd thing for someone to do. Not even sure how to describe it.
"The Ruby community has a DHH problem":
https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
Is he known to, like, reference his politics in his conference talks or something?
He is a consistent pot stirrer, whether it's his politics or his vendettas, and he never really stops talking about them
Is it ok to put Goebbels on a stage if he isn't talking politics?
I couldn't care less if Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot or even Bob Monkhouse[2] were pushing open source patches and contributing talks, as long as they:
- do not turn away from debate - do not turn to or espouse violence[1] - and their contributions were of merit
Since DHH has done none of that then the answer is "yes, it's okay to put him on a stage to talk about tech".
[1] I thank Karl Popper for showing the way here with his Paradox of tolerance.
[2] Bob was the master of self-deprecating jokes, I hope he would appreciate that one.
Huh, apparently he is a “white supremacist” for posts like this?
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-waning-days-of-dei-s-dominance...
I missed all this drama, it does seem like there is an echo chamber forming over on Bluesky…
Someone linked an article above that is worth a read - He's said some pretty horrific stuff about minority groups & is echoing discredited sentiment on immigrants and other minorities. It's worth a read.
https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
He's voicedly MAGA-adjacent, has often written against the evils of multiculturalism and how happy he was about Trump winning the elections.
I don't think he's a white supremacist, but it is understandable that some people don't like his ideas.
There are valid criticisms of multiculturalism and there are valid merits to Trump winning the elections.
The totalitarian mindset will not even tolerate you “platforming” people who don’t sufficiently agree with it (even if you agree on 90% of things).
The Ruby community has long had a rift between two types of members, the really nice folks that take after Matz, and techbro assholes like DHH. The former have mostly tolerated the latter creating an ugly toxicity that the community has become known for, and is why I use Ruby, but have not involved myself with it. Zed Shaw, a well-known asshole himself, described it in this piece: https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto
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.
> 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
Just to add a bit of context here... DHH was added to the Shopify board last year. Shopify also brought in a CTO with very questionable actions and statements during multiple company townhalls and all-hands. He would be making wild statements on stream while VPs would be in the Slack channel trying to defuse and reframe. This was a big reason why I left Shopify last spring.
It would be more accurate to say that the rift is between intolerant progressive activists and people who just want to work on the code without getting politics involved.
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...
Probably the fact that DHH introduced Solid Queue to Rails which can replace Sidekiq. Of course they're not going to say that, it'll be some excuse about his lukewarm European politics...
I've formed a positive opinion of Parham's character by the way he's conducted himself over the years. And Solid Queue isn't a serious Sidekiq replacement for the types of high volume applications where you'd want a Sidekiq license; I doubt he even sees it as a threat.
Just to echo those sentiments, Mike Perham has appeared on a panel discussion recently with his 'competitors', including Solid Queue.
https://www.rubyevents.org/talks/panel-the-past-present-and-...
He strikes me as egotistical.
Do a Google search for Sidekiq DHH. First link is about migrating from Sidekiq to Solid Queue. Third result (for me anyway) is a Reddit thread where Perham talks about trying to make Basecamp a customer and that he wasn't able to...
It's Perham.
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.
Source? That’s hard for me to believe.
"As I remember London": https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
I can see how you'd read it that way, but I read it like this, "I went to Lisbon and it was basically a bunch of California programmer bros. The culture there has been lost, and that loss is regrettable."
In other words, it can be read more charitably as a lamentation about the loss / changing of a culture.
Nah, it's pretty clearly dog-whistling for racists. Talking about 'native Brits' vs 'mass immigration' changing the 'culture and makeup'? People don't say 'makeup' to refer to California programmer bro culture, they are talking about racial makeup.
Then he goes on about 'Pakistani rape gangs' and 'abuse of British girls'–oh look, the classic trope of the nasty browns and blacks preying on our precious white children.
Then take this: 'There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.'
These words would not be out of place in 1066 Britain ie 'this is a country of the Saxons, not the Normans'. Britain has seen this exact brand of xenophobia for millennia, in fact they even had periods of bigotry against Danes! If dhh had gone to London at the wrong point in history, he might have experienced racial prejudice.
Interesting, right?
Sure, they don't like DHH. I never much liked him either (too opinionated for my taste), though Rails is a really good thing and honestly put Ruby on the map, and DHH deserves credit for that. But seriously, pull all their funding because of being platformed at RailsConf (_Rails_Conf, not _Ruby_Conf). Seems over-reactionary, and ultimately hurtful to the Ruby community (making them more dependent on Shopify).
Update: To be fair, I haven't followed DHH/Rails/Ruby community for the past decade (was very involved ~15 yrs ago), so my views may be outdated. Still I think pulling the funding doesn't help Ruby.
I don't like DHH (for whatever reason), and I would never want to spend my own money on 'platforming' him. It seems pretty reasonable that someone/company applies discretion to which community events they sponsor.
Sure it feels good to pull money as a kneejerk reaction and virtue signalling, but it's still generally a good idea to think through the consequences of your actions.
We should be thankful a project like Sidekiq sponsored so much money over such a long period. Whatever reason they had to pull out, the blame should lie on the lack of other companies stepping in and keeping some power balance.
Its especially wild given how their action in pulling funding seems to have been a prime motivator for this power grab: in their attempt to boycott DHH, they quite literally handed him the keys to the kingdom.
It does imply an option here. For the affected ruby gems core team to strike up a sponsorship agreement and launch a forked ruby gems service. For developers who agree that the original team was treated terribly, it’s a one line code change at the top of our Gemfiles to get behind a new gem repository.
A "boycott" assumes voiced opinions, and I don't think we have anything public about why Sidekiq stopped sponsoring.
We assume it's linked to DHH because he's an asshole, but that's just our own theories.
From what I can tell, he was insufficiently enthusiastic about immigration. And, you know. You can't be saying that stuff.
He has been adopting a more conservative slant and that makes some people irrationally angry.
Damn, you hate to see it. I was skeptical of the hate at first, but this is pretty lame, I take it back and admit to being wrong before.
I hope this all works out. I remember the day Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and the impact it had on the community and maintainers.
https://archive.ph/tg8pQ
I dont understand why did Shopify wanted to take control and kick maintenners out?
DHH is part of shopify's board currently apparently.
I’m angry because I thought this was initially heavy handedness on shopify’s part.
Instead it’s people abusing the trust and power they have to try and cancel DHH because they don’t agree with him about some things. Absolutely sickens me to see the cancellation in motion. Completely bigoted and self righteous behaviour.
The moment I saw Arko's name I knew what this was about, the petty culture war that some in the Ruby community engage in, and I was right. My only surprise is that something is finally being done.
Knew what it was about, created an hn account, and made this comment?
I don't follow this kind of thing so forgive my ignorance. Why was "platforming" DHH bad? Honest question.
He posted a personal blog post a few days ago decrying that London is not white enough. He has a history of very right-leaning positions.
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.
Well yes, thinking people should be treated equally regardless of their sexuality or color of their skin is good, and the opposite is bad. Is that the kind of "very left leaning position" you had in mind? Or something else?
What you described is, of course, a perfectly honest account of the issue, and definitely not a strawman set up just to be knocked down.
Do you have some idea what they meant by extreme left leaning issues? I'd like to hear your take.
Sure: importing migrants with no end in sight while shutting down any convo over what the limit should be; there is no limit and you're racist if you disagree.
And it's not a principled position on open borders nor open migration but instead part of a double standard. These same people probably cheer on the protests in Mexico City against white gringos in Condesa.
That's how I'd summarize the far left position. The far right one is probably that migrants are bad. And I suppose the middle position is that there's a problem when immigration rate outpaces cultural assimilation.
Is unlimited immigration really popular among the far left? Sounds more like a libertarian position to me.
After some quick googling I can't find any groups that support that.
I did find a poll that shows 64% of Americans support creating some path for undocumented immigrants to get legal status. I'm not sure you could call 64% a far left position though.
Here's a NYTimes article from 2020 https://archive.md/uJl8t and another from 2025 https://archive.md/5az0U. No one wants the "open borders" label but there was and still remains many who see migrants as the source of their personal salvation.
> Is unlimited immigration really popular among the far left?
That this is being memory-holed, much like the ill-conceived bilingual education initiatives of the 90s, is actually a good sign, as it's proof that we're winning.
> After some quick googling I can't find any groups that support that.
They don't "support unlimited immigration", they reject the legitimacy of national borders and of immigration as a concept.
For example here's the DSA explaining their view that the national border and immigration statuses are capitalist and imperialist tools to divide the working class: https://www.dsausa.org/blog/fighting-the-security-state-at-t...
Excellent! Thank you for finding that, my Google fu isn't as strong as it used to be.
I'm still not sure that's representative of the far left. Like I said, the more right wing libertarian position is probably the same, though for different reasons.
You just happen to hold this 'middle position' I imagine?
The left-leaning ones usually don't call for the eradication of certain peoples.
Neither side can claim not to be violent. Obviously.
If we're talking about the US, that's a straw man. There was a study that made objectively clear that the right is several times more actively violent than the left.
"Both sides" is a euphemistic fig leaf of an argument at best.
In the past 100 years, Leftists and ideology have killed many multiples more people than the Nazis did.
To be fair, neither do the right-leaning ones; the ones that do have fallen completely on their side. It's just that societal discourse has been purposefully skewed so that the mean lean is 60 degrees to the right, making it very easy for weak individuals to fall over.
> hen did we decide platforming very left-leaning positions is good, and platforming very right-leaning ones is bad?
The same way DHH can have opinions, one-man-companies forking the sponsorship momey can have some too. "We" didn't decide anything, a sponsor company decided to stop sponsoring (with no public commentary), that's all that happened.
More to the point, "platforming" is an active operation, I think anyone can decide who they want to promote and why. It's fundamentally different from censoring.
I disagree with this framing as well. There's nothing wrong with "right-leaning" statements or opinions. DHH can talk all he wants about a desire for smaller governments, opinions on gun control, or conservative fiscal policy.
However, people that espouse intolerance of others based on the colour of their skin is just objectively bad. Sometimes there is a right and a wrong side to things. The problem is that some on the political-right seem to have aligned themselves with policy or viewpoints that stand for hatred.
You would need to identify specific far left views that would be comparably objectionable. I’m not going to be upset if someone has wonky ideas about free market systems or tax codes. DHH has said some objectively racist rhetoric on his blog and called Tommy Robinson’s recent march “heartwarming”.
I think the real issue is framing blatant racism as a 'very right-leaning' opinion. It does a disservice to people who have normal conservative opinions on economic or social issues. We've moved past race as a social issue long ago. It's not a debate that should be had anymore. Racists aren't conservative or right wing - they're just bigots.
And to be clear, you can discuss immigration policy without being racist. In the blog post in question DHH gives his support to a convicted criminal, who is also a former member of an explicitly fascist political party and founder of an islamophobic hate group. That's not 'right-leaning'. It's support for a racist criminal. I'm unsure whether DHH is actually a bigot or just completely engulfed in the rhetoric common on Twitter these days. Either way he's a fucking moron pontificating on something which he has no actual experience of. Maybe when the US invades Greenland and starts deporting the Danes from the US he'll discover empathy.
> Maybe when the US invades Greenland and starts deporting the Danes from the US he'll discover empathy.
is he actually US citizen or dual or just Danish?
> is he actually US citizen or dual or just Danish?
The question is, does that even matter to the current regime?
you think we should platform racism?
I read the DHH post in question: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64. It is pretty standard anti-immigrant. It feels like it is acknowledging the fact that the populations of Western countries are in a demographic crisis, they are sub-replacement in terms of fertility but instead of fixing that he just wants to ban immigrants. It feels like fixing the fertility issue would solve the root issue.
You don't need to carry water for racists and invent more palatable explanations for what they said. There's nothing in there about not enough British people - only about too many foreigners (whom he can tell by looking at them).
That is always the case with this kind of rant. People want to have the cake and eat it too.
He wrote another blog post promoting fertility, so at least he’s consistent.
Promoting sustainable fertility is good in my books. We need sustainable fertility like we need sustainable environmentalism, and similar things.
I strongly believe that low fertility causes immigration backlash because some governments try to maintain their population by importing immigrants rather than fixing the fertility issue and a low fertility causes the domestic population to be insecure (e.g. "replacement theory") in the face of the immigrants. Some immigration combined with sustainable fertility is the solution.
Judge for yourself: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 (a web search on "Tommy Robinson" would help with context).
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.
He's made comments supporting the Trucker protest in Canada and he knew fuck all about it too.
There's seems to be a trend of knowing fuck all ... except about Ruby on Rails.
Sounds like DHH has finally realised he has enough fuck you money. And that is the truest test of character you can ever have.
Elon Musk failed. DHH failed. ... failed. Etc.
Are you sure you posted the right article? There's nothing about Ruby or RubyGems in it.
The question was "Why was "platforming" DHH bad?". Some people disagree with the views represented in that linked blog post, and do not wish to sponsor events that showcase him.
Personally, I think DHH is a troll and would never be interested in sponsoring, or attending, an event that involved him.
There is, however, a whole lot that says a lot about the character of DHH in it, such as by repeating rhetoric of the UK's racist far-right.
David Heinemeier Hansson, also known by his initials DHH, is a Danish programmer, writer, entrepreneur, and racing driver. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a web framework written in Ruby.[1]
He’s been posting increasingly inflammatory articles, for the most recent round refer to https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
I too am wondering this.
He held the wrong political opinions.
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
Related:
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
shut down Ruby Central, if not, they will make gems and bundler a payed servive.
Just read DHH's Sept 15th Heyworld post ... what an absolute sh1t spiral ... it reads like someone who's bubble of information has defeated them. Is that what getting old looks like? .... terrifying .... he sounds like the wanker corner of our local pub .. the only difference is he has the platform and money to amplify his semi-drunk sounding, ignorant views ... how the mighty have fallen. RIP.
Can somebody provide an archive link? Trying to access the site, I get a Cloudflare security page that says my access has been blocked by some security rules.
https://archive.ph/tg8pQ
Thank you!
https://web.archive.org/web/20250923163607/https://joel.drap...
if it wasn't for DHH, Ruby would be a hobby programming language at best. The community can say what it wants, but it and frankly, most of the web programmers in the world, owe DHH some thanks. If it weren't for him, Yehuda Katz and John Resig, 90% of the web would still be written with Perl, CGI and VBScript.
90% of the web is written in PHP, and Rails didn't change that.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Owning a source code project doesn't entitle you to admin in the github organization it belongs to, so I don't get why this article keeps hammering that point. Ownership of rubygems doesn't matter as all that's changing is members of a github organization.
Given the recent pwnage of part of the npm ecosystem, a panicked overreaction from Shopify & RubyCentral almost seems inevitable.
This is my understanding:
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.
Incorrect.
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.