A bit of useful context for DHH’s response: he’s had beef with at least one of these maintainers before, and tried to get him removed from stuff.
As André Arko’s employer at his day job at the time, I was tangential to it, so I don’t know all the details, and my memory is imperfect.
But as I understand it, DHH either organized or was part of a group of prominent rubyists who wrote a letter to the Board of Directors of the trade guild (or some other similar unusual non-profit structure) that André had organized to help get funding to support the open source work he and some others did for Ruby infrastructure like Bundler and/or Rubygems. I don’t know the exact terms of the sanctions they sought, but in the end it resulted in his orgs work getting folded into RubyCentral, iirc.
For some reason it seems they disapproved of how André had found a way to get paid for working on open source. He was managing to pay himself and some other people a good wage for part-time open source work. He was even managing to get a bit more diversity involved in it than a lot of Ruby open source infra work typically has (employing a black trans woman SE as part of this). Whatever their actual motivations they disapproved of André founding his own org and running it as he did.
The irony of their most prominent signatory getting rich off open source, via a different less direct avenue of monetization seemed entirely lost on them.
Anyway, I think it blew up in their face and things got settled out into what the status quo of rubygems maintenance was since then.
Now, I’ve heard rumors that perhaps this is actually related. RubyCentral has had a rough few years and DHH has more than a little pull with at least one of their largest funders.
It’d be incredibly petty to do something like dangling funding in front of RC if they’d finish icing out maintainers that he didn’t see eye to eye with. But it would certainly fit the way the events happened. I don’t know anything directly enough to swear by this and wouldn’t want to implicate anyone even if I did.
But I guess look at the known character of the people involved and draw your own conclusions. Does this seem in character to prior behaviors?
