> Unlike many community non-profits (including the Python Software Foundation), Ruby Central does not hold elections for their board of directors.
The PSF is a hellhole where everyone tries to cancel each other. People like David Mertz and Steve Holden [1] who supported other cancellations were cancelled themselves. And of course Tim Peters for opposing other cancellations.
You are only secure in the corporate inner circle, just like in Ruby. Even there Google got tired of the antics and fired Python core developers.
You use the PSF to gain influence and get a high salary with minimal work, inside and outside Python.
[1] The one-eyed snake (stuffed animal) "incident" PSF director.
It provides mostly a counter-statement to what RubyCentral wrote.
What the "real" or closer-to-the-truth statement is we may never be able to find out, but on some singular points both sides would have to agree, e. g. timeline (for the most part).
I thought Ruby Central were/had put this stuff behind them.
why are they still threatening to sue Andre Arko, and reporting him to the fbi?!
When I saw the postmortem or whatever it was called from schneems (and when I heard/saw he was involved and what he was doing) I really thought things were moving in the right direction.
They aren't "threatening" to sue Andre. They threatened to sue him in October and haven't retracted it. He also threatened to sue them by raising issues about Bundler trademark.
A very common thing that happens in settlement of legal issues and even potential legal issues is: "you drop your claims and I'll drop mine".
He's shaming them for not backing down while he simultaneously will not back down. His framing is disingenuous.
He doesn't want a fair settlement and for parties to go their separate ways. He wants to wrestle control away from Ruby Central.
>He doesn't want a fair settlement and for parties to go their separate ways. He wants to wrestle control away from Ruby Central.
im not super familiar with this drama, so can you tell me where to find this information? the post indicates he just wants an apology and perhaps attorney fees covered.
Are you blind to the fact that this is a shot in a PR war? Every lawyer on the planet will tell you to not discuss your legal issues in public. Especially if you're trying to settle.
Andre brings up legal risk but then does the stupidest, most self-destructive thing you can do if you're facing any kind of real legal problem.
He either doesn't think the threat is real (and thus blatantly lying) or he's writing this thinking it gives him more leverage.
As for where to find it? I'm not your search engine. There's google. even Search HN.
>Are you blind to the fact that this is a shot in a PR war?
i just told you im not familiar with the drama and am looking for where to obtain the other side of the story, which you seem to know and be passionate about
>As for where to find it? I'm not your search engine. There's google. even Search HN.
okay... i dont think i will ever understand why someone goes onto a discussion board, talks about something passionately, and then gets upset when someone else on the discussion board asks them something.
Because I didn't reference anything that wasn't mentioned in the post of the article. I brought in no outside facts. It's not my job to bring you up to speed on a discussion that I'm not even digging beyond the main article into with my comments.
You asked me to do something and I have no interest in doing that. Instead of just accepting that I told you no you're snarkily "I just asked you a simple question"-ing me. I don't have to, just move on with your day.
I'm still heartbroken by how this has turned out, and it doesn't feel like things have gotten better over the last 9-10 months. I really feel in 10-20 years we will look back at these events as a dark time for this community. I hope to still be writing Ruby in that future. I hope the wounds here, both personal and professional, actually get healed.
I was always a fan of Ruby syntax. With all the unsettled business this has flung up, though, I've moved more to Crystal. Once a language org starts playing fast and loose with lawyers, it is hard to tell where it is going to wind up.
Agreed. Though, I don't even think rails + DHH is the biggest issue. I did not use or need rails and had no issue with DHH, but now that he is driving shopify policy and ruby devs were eliminated, the situation is no longer neutral. Something changed to the worse in the ruby ecosystem, that is clear. I get less restriction at github-Microsoft than I get at rubygems.org - that part in itself is super-strange. The folks who were responsible for ruining rubygems.org should really reconsider. Look at how the new visual look is - it sucks. (It was not great before, mind you, but finding things takes much longer than it used to be before; that visual change is only perhaps 2 or 3 months old. Who is driving these crazy changes?)
What are DHH antics? I looked at the 2021 "controversy" and he seems entirely adequate. For me it's obvious now, but as time moves on it will be obvious for more people that DHH did nothing wrong (in the 2021 case).
>a post so openly racist that an LLM refused to translate it.
Wait until LLMs start to refuse to translate pro-trans or anti-Israel writing because "there are only two genders" and "post [is] so openly antisemitic."
I just read the post and no he didn't. He said Roma people should get deported - which, if they are in the country illegally, is correct.
It's tiring to read the constant hyperbole comparing everyone to Hitler and the Nazis. I take it all with a massive grain of salt now. If fascism really does make a comeback, I'm sure I won't believe it until it's too late thanks to you folks. But yeah, keep exaggerating, keep beating that "my political opponents are fascists" drum, I'm sure nothing bad will happen.
How so? Does Hiroshi handle proposals at github better? Because I have not seen evidence for that. Ruby feels much more locked down nowadays. It has always had a Japanese driven programming language, of course, but now it feels much more closely aligned to first tier japanese and second tier non-japanese (unless they worked at/for shopify or github). And I am pretty certain to not be the only one who has had the same impression (again, excluding e. g. shopify or microsoft).
Underrated comment. Unfortunately too many people won't be able to see this fact past the battle lines they've already drawn.
Those of us who just want to get our work done do though. This whole drama is so exhausting and I'm not surprised by which party is still trying to draw the pitchforks out.
On some singular points I disagree with Arko. For instance, the
bundler/gem situation - while he mentions the trademark issue,
and I have no comment to make about this, ruby itself naturally
should provide and have a use case for distributing code to
other people. Other languages have that too, see Rust + cargo.
On other points I agree, and it is really unfortunate how things
changed. I remember having used ruby before gems existed; then
I think four guys (if I recall correctly) created gems within
some days. From there it became more widely used.
Fast forward some time, until recently, and things really changed
to the worse. The first time I noticed this was when suddenly
shopify corporate hackers spawned over everywhere and, strangely
enough, tried to dictate corporate behaviour and rules onto the
ruby ecosystem. Tons of ruby devs were all employed by shopify,
and shopify here behaved very strangely overall. The isssues
were not the same as github and then github-Microsoft - something
is really strange with shopify. One shopify corporate dev demanded
that everyone must verify who they are before publishing to rubygems;
another shopify dev tried to lecture me in how to use the official
ruby tracker. I used that one for almost 15 years before and some
young 20-years older corporate hacker suddenly tries to lecture
people +twice their own age. Then suddenly the rules for rubygems.org
also changed, to appease a corporate agenda:
They can hijack gems and not bother to notify you. (Naturally they
need to be able to distribute the code, otherwise the gem ecosystem
would make no sense, but look at the legalese crap - that is now
a project under corporate control.)
What made me actually retire, after trying to talk some sense into
these new accounts that seized control, was the 100.000 download
limit. Past that point I can no longer remove my code (unless I
delete my profile, which I did, since I don't accept shopify or
whoever else hijack my code; note that on github I can remove my
own code no matter how many downloads occurred. I also told
rubygems.org to host gems THEY want to offer themselves, rather
than abuse and force-restrict ruby developers as the 100k download
limit was. That was the year before Hiroshi Shibata mass-purged
ruby developers.)
The real tragedy, though, is not the in-fight between Arko and
RubyCentral, whoever is the new corporate Overlord. The real
tragedy is that financial interests can totally pwn an ecosystem.
And unfortunately, I am also 100% certain that Hiroshi Shibata
did not act on his own but had direct approval by matz, which
makes this even more problematic. But anyway, I think rather than
dwell on the past, one another disagreement I have with arko is
that there indeed has to be a way to move forward. This won't be
easy. IMO, the structure of ruby should be changed, to completely
disentangle any financial interest that keeps on driving policy
changes. That is, in my opinion, the biggest issue - while I blame
shopify for the most part, the whole situation could be exploited
by any other big money giver too. That's not good. That's not healthy.
That should change.
The whole notion of constantly shuffling in different people into
RubyCentral, in hope that this will "fix everything" ... is naive.
That's not going to work. IMO, the better approach was when gems
was run by people from the community. Yes, I understand the issue
of funding and time allocation so I am not saying it has to be the
way it used to be, even though I found the early days of ruby + gems
MUCH much better than the shopify era (I am not even going into what
DHH writes - even AI would get angry at having to write what DHH
writes nowadays).
Unfortunately this is now a chicken-egg problem, because ruby is
struggling - and declining, let's be honest here. The language in
and by itself is great and I don't think anyone ever claimed
otherwise about the language itself, it is well-designed. But the
ecosystem changed, both due to external and internal reasons, and
it has not changed to the better, IMO.
> The real tragedy is that financial interests can totally pwn an ecosystem.
Yeah I was struck while reading this that they had multiple sponsors, enough money for multiple conferences, paid contributors both full and part time, and they obviously have enough money to pay lawyers. That's not a small amount of change. Most programming languages don't have nearly that level of support, so that's quite something for a language in decline, as you put it. Seems more like vultures picking a carcass than anything.
> Unlike many community non-profits (including the Python Software Foundation), Ruby Central does not hold elections for their board of directors.
The PSF is a hellhole where everyone tries to cancel each other. People like David Mertz and Steve Holden [1] who supported other cancellations were cancelled themselves. And of course Tim Peters for opposing other cancellations.
You are only secure in the corporate inner circle, just like in Ruby. Even there Google got tired of the antics and fired Python core developers.
You use the PSF to gain influence and get a high salary with minimal work, inside and outside Python.
[1] The one-eyed snake (stuffed animal) "incident" PSF director.
> lost 3 of 3 members of the Open Source Committee (Gabi, Mike, Ufuk)
This is rich given they left in big part because of how much abuse they have received by "supporters" of André & co...
That’s a heck of a thing for somebody to go through. I’m sorry man.
It provides mostly a counter-statement to what RubyCentral wrote.
What the "real" or closer-to-the-truth statement is we may never be able to find out, but on some singular points both sides would have to agree, e. g. timeline (for the most part).
I thought Ruby Central were/had put this stuff behind them.
why are they still threatening to sue Andre Arko, and reporting him to the fbi?!
When I saw the postmortem or whatever it was called from schneems (and when I heard/saw he was involved and what he was doing) I really thought things were moving in the right direction.
Because he is inconvenient to them, presumably.
They aren't "threatening" to sue Andre. They threatened to sue him in October and haven't retracted it. He also threatened to sue them by raising issues about Bundler trademark.
A very common thing that happens in settlement of legal issues and even potential legal issues is: "you drop your claims and I'll drop mine".
He's shaming them for not backing down while he simultaneously will not back down. His framing is disingenuous.
He doesn't want a fair settlement and for parties to go their separate ways. He wants to wrestle control away from Ruby Central.
>He doesn't want a fair settlement and for parties to go their separate ways. He wants to wrestle control away from Ruby Central.
im not super familiar with this drama, so can you tell me where to find this information? the post indicates he just wants an apology and perhaps attorney fees covered.
Are you blind to the fact that this is a shot in a PR war? Every lawyer on the planet will tell you to not discuss your legal issues in public. Especially if you're trying to settle.
Andre brings up legal risk but then does the stupidest, most self-destructive thing you can do if you're facing any kind of real legal problem.
He either doesn't think the threat is real (and thus blatantly lying) or he's writing this thinking it gives him more leverage.
As for where to find it? I'm not your search engine. There's google. even Search HN.
>Are you blind to the fact that this is a shot in a PR war?
i just told you im not familiar with the drama and am looking for where to obtain the other side of the story, which you seem to know and be passionate about
>As for where to find it? I'm not your search engine. There's google. even Search HN.
okay... i dont think i will ever understand why someone goes onto a discussion board, talks about something passionately, and then gets upset when someone else on the discussion board asks them something.
Because I didn't reference anything that wasn't mentioned in the post of the article. I brought in no outside facts. It's not my job to bring you up to speed on a discussion that I'm not even digging beyond the main article into with my comments.
You asked me to do something and I have no interest in doing that. Instead of just accepting that I told you no you're snarkily "I just asked you a simple question"-ing me. I don't have to, just move on with your day.
okay.
perhaps in the future you might consider writing a blog, instead of comments on HN, so that other people wont disturb you.
Did Arko ever explain why he was trying to sell access to Rubygem's web access logs?
He did not try to do that, he proposed a monetization scheme
I'm still heartbroken by how this has turned out, and it doesn't feel like things have gotten better over the last 9-10 months. I really feel in 10-20 years we will look back at these events as a dark time for this community. I hope to still be writing Ruby in that future. I hope the wounds here, both personal and professional, actually get healed.
The days of "Matz is nice, so we are nice" seem a distant memory of a bygone era. I suppose because they are.
I was always a fan of Ruby syntax. With all the unsettled business this has flung up, though, I've moved more to Crystal. Once a language org starts playing fast and loose with lawyers, it is hard to tell where it is going to wind up.
I checked and yes, dayssincerubydrama.com is saying 0
a lot of tragic things keep happening to the ruby ecosystem.
the language has improved in the recent additions - ractors, it's faster now & always a pleasure to write.
however the ruby ecosystem has a tendency to deny reality - ruby is falling down rankings - people deny that's false but everything points to that.
the ecosystem is not willing to move away from rails. & DHHs antics don't help either.
Agreed. Though, I don't even think rails + DHH is the biggest issue. I did not use or need rails and had no issue with DHH, but now that he is driving shopify policy and ruby devs were eliminated, the situation is no longer neutral. Something changed to the worse in the ruby ecosystem, that is clear. I get less restriction at github-Microsoft than I get at rubygems.org - that part in itself is super-strange. The folks who were responsible for ruining rubygems.org should really reconsider. Look at how the new visual look is - it sucks. (It was not great before, mind you, but finding things takes much longer than it used to be before; that visual change is only perhaps 2 or 3 months old. Who is driving these crazy changes?)
What are DHH antics? I looked at the 2021 "controversy" and he seems entirely adequate. For me it's obvious now, but as time moves on it will be obvious for more people that DHH did nothing wrong (in the 2021 case).
Most recently he compared Roma people to wolves that should be exterminated, a post so openly racist that an LLM refused to translate it.
As someone else pointed out, he’s really doing everything he can to put the HH in DHH.
(Lest that seem a flippant comment, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_Holocaust)
>a post so openly racist that an LLM refused to translate it.
Wait until LLMs start to refuse to translate pro-trans or anti-Israel writing because "there are only two genders" and "post [is] so openly antisemitic."
Here is the post: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
Am I also a bad person if I agree that the solution is deportation?
I just read the post and no he didn't. He said Roma people should get deported - which, if they are in the country illegally, is correct.
It's tiring to read the constant hyperbole comparing everyone to Hitler and the Nazis. I take it all with a massive grain of salt now. If fascism really does make a comeback, I'm sure I won't believe it until it's too late thanks to you folks. But yeah, keep exaggerating, keep beating that "my political opponents are fascists" drum, I'm sure nothing bad will happen.
Tragic
Btw, I heard Matz&co had taken over rubygems.org, right?
That's what is seems to say in the article
Meanwhile, bundler and rubygems are being maintained ably, if not better, by hsbt.
How so? Does Hiroshi handle proposals at github better? Because I have not seen evidence for that. Ruby feels much more locked down nowadays. It has always had a Japanese driven programming language, of course, but now it feels much more closely aligned to first tier japanese and second tier non-japanese (unless they worked at/for shopify or github). And I am pretty certain to not be the only one who has had the same impression (again, excluding e. g. shopify or microsoft).
There are a lot of bug fixes and changes happening. Even a very useful feature (cooldowns). See https://blog.rubygems.org
As a user, I have no complaints. Quite the opposite; I've been impressed by how well he is doing with it.
[flagged]
Underrated comment. Unfortunately too many people won't be able to see this fact past the battle lines they've already drawn.
Those of us who just want to get our work done do though. This whole drama is so exhausting and I'm not surprised by which party is still trying to draw the pitchforks out.
On some singular points I disagree with Arko. For instance, the bundler/gem situation - while he mentions the trademark issue, and I have no comment to make about this, ruby itself naturally should provide and have a use case for distributing code to other people. Other languages have that too, see Rust + cargo.
On other points I agree, and it is really unfortunate how things changed. I remember having used ruby before gems existed; then I think four guys (if I recall correctly) created gems within some days. From there it became more widely used.
Fast forward some time, until recently, and things really changed to the worse. The first time I noticed this was when suddenly shopify corporate hackers spawned over everywhere and, strangely enough, tried to dictate corporate behaviour and rules onto the ruby ecosystem. Tons of ruby devs were all employed by shopify, and shopify here behaved very strangely overall. The isssues were not the same as github and then github-Microsoft - something is really strange with shopify. One shopify corporate dev demanded that everyone must verify who they are before publishing to rubygems; another shopify dev tried to lecture me in how to use the official ruby tracker. I used that one for almost 15 years before and some young 20-years older corporate hacker suddenly tries to lecture people +twice their own age. Then suddenly the rules for rubygems.org also changed, to appease a corporate agenda:
https://rubygems.org/policies
They can hijack gems and not bother to notify you. (Naturally they need to be able to distribute the code, otherwise the gem ecosystem would make no sense, but look at the legalese crap - that is now a project under corporate control.)
What made me actually retire, after trying to talk some sense into these new accounts that seized control, was the 100.000 download limit. Past that point I can no longer remove my code (unless I delete my profile, which I did, since I don't accept shopify or whoever else hijack my code; note that on github I can remove my own code no matter how many downloads occurred. I also told rubygems.org to host gems THEY want to offer themselves, rather than abuse and force-restrict ruby developers as the 100k download limit was. That was the year before Hiroshi Shibata mass-purged ruby developers.)
The real tragedy, though, is not the in-fight between Arko and RubyCentral, whoever is the new corporate Overlord. The real tragedy is that financial interests can totally pwn an ecosystem. And unfortunately, I am also 100% certain that Hiroshi Shibata did not act on his own but had direct approval by matz, which makes this even more problematic. But anyway, I think rather than dwell on the past, one another disagreement I have with arko is that there indeed has to be a way to move forward. This won't be easy. IMO, the structure of ruby should be changed, to completely disentangle any financial interest that keeps on driving policy changes. That is, in my opinion, the biggest issue - while I blame shopify for the most part, the whole situation could be exploited by any other big money giver too. That's not good. That's not healthy. That should change.
The whole notion of constantly shuffling in different people into RubyCentral, in hope that this will "fix everything" ... is naive. That's not going to work. IMO, the better approach was when gems was run by people from the community. Yes, I understand the issue of funding and time allocation so I am not saying it has to be the way it used to be, even though I found the early days of ruby + gems MUCH much better than the shopify era (I am not even going into what DHH writes - even AI would get angry at having to write what DHH writes nowadays).
Unfortunately this is now a chicken-egg problem, because ruby is struggling - and declining, let's be honest here. The language in and by itself is great and I don't think anyone ever claimed otherwise about the language itself, it is well-designed. But the ecosystem changed, both due to external and internal reasons, and it has not changed to the better, IMO.
> The real tragedy is that financial interests can totally pwn an ecosystem.
Yeah I was struck while reading this that they had multiple sponsors, enough money for multiple conferences, paid contributors both full and part time, and they obviously have enough money to pay lawyers. That's not a small amount of change. Most programming languages don't have nearly that level of support, so that's quite something for a language in decline, as you put it. Seems more like vultures picking a carcass than anything.