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?

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julik 3 days ago | parent [-]

Interesting scoop!

	▲	knzai 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks. Re “scoop” as I said, I wouldn’t swear to any of this on the stand and it certainly doesn’t meet journalistic standards. Consider it opinion piece/color commentary. … That said both the person this time and people before who allegedly signed onto DHH’s nonsense I’m incredibly disappointed in. Most of them I considered at the least collegial acquaintances and some of them friends. So I felt like I knew them at least well enough to say they were above his sort of divisive rhetoric. But people frequently disappoint. Maybe I have it all wrong and André, REDACTED, and REDACTED* have done something awful or something…. but from what I know of their characters I seriously doubt it. Of course, IDK what the DHH crowd is actually thinking, if any of this is true, since in that case they don’t exactly discuss this openly, purely dealing in backroom shenanigans that one could almost think verged on collusion and that leads some groups like RC to possibly violate contract and employment law (at the very least copyright if you check who actually has the copyright on some of the stuff they distribute…). That is if any of the things people are saying is true. But hey, Rubyists are all “nice” right? Nobody says ethical or kind was a requirement. * There’s at least two people that I kno- err that is that I strongly suspect, have been tarred by mere association with André. I have a theory it’s more than just them. Apparently he’s insidious about leaking liberal labor thoughts like people should get paid enough to support their families in expensive tech hubs, even if they are working on open source. But apparently “professional open source maintainer” is anathema to some people’s vision and they’d prefer everything to depend on volunteer labor only. Which is a position multi-millionaires who successfully monetized that volunteer labor could take, sure. But it’d make them hypocrites, in the worst of ways. Especially since their alleged actions are leading to some of said maintainers losing work doing so, but they supposedly seem okay with funding others. At that point it stops being a logical, if unethical platform, and more personal spite?