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.

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.

Thank you, this explains it for me. The situation is still stupid tough...

The confusing thing to me about Shopify's role in this - assuming this reporting is accurate - is that if they think having a dependency on open source infrastructure like this is an existential threat, then you would think the solution is to do their own work to break that dependency, not to throw their weight around in this public and dramatic way.

It does not sound like Shopify were adults in the room. Sounds like they were the assholes essentially stealing in the room.

Pulling funding is legitimate step on the other hand.

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.

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: 

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.

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.

Status quo administrators had their access revoked without their consent and without cause. That's malice.

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

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

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?

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

The project promised a lot in the beginning and some folks new to a language like Ruby were so enthused by what they could do that they didn't pay much attention to the admin drama at the beginning.

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

This was likely a reaction to a mix of NPM + culture war/deplatforming, where power player got nervous and decided to clamp down on rubygems security to insulate it from hypothetical bad actors.

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.

Quote:

> In his blog post, André says, “For the last ten years or so of working on Bundler, I’ve had a wish rattling around: I want a better dependency manager. It doesn’t just manage your gems, it manages your ruby versions, too. It doesn’t just manage your ruby versions, it installs pre-compiled rubies so you don’t have to wait for ruby to compile from source every time. And more than all of that, it makes it completely trivial to run any script or tool written in ruby, even if that script or tool needs a different ruby than your application does.”

> Bluesky threads reveal that Rafael França (Shopify / Rails Core) saw this tool as a threat, saying “some of the “admins” even announced publicly many days ago they were launching a competitor tool [rv] and were funding raising for it. I’d not trust the system to such “admin”.”

So a dev was innovating to make better tool to meet their needs (which is what most open source maintainers are generally doing all day), and then some guys immediately jumped to the possibility that they would then actively sabotage RubyGems? Whoa, that is insane.

Trying to kill innovation and a start-up out of fear doesn't sound like Shopify's branding in the media.

So HSBT was the owner? And transfered ownership?

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

> It is a lot less welcoming when DHH repeatedly uses his platform to say that I shouldn't exist or have equal rights.

Can you point to any of his blog posts that says this ?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> HH has been going off the deep end with his rhetoric for years, the current political environment has made it so that he can't be ignored anymore.

But Shopify is also right wing in its executive team, and via these move they appear to be support DHH:

https://pressprogress.ca/shopify-executives-right-wing-media...

https://disconnect.blog/the-conservative-tech-alliance-is-co...

And yeah, Shopify is going to protect DHH because DHH is on Shopify's board:

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

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

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

Thank you!

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.

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

I distinctly remember a specific Twitter comment, maybe 7ish years ago, that solidified my view on DHH as a person. It was a thread about remote work. Someone from South America commented trying to be nice to David, saying something like "you should work remotely from Chile, it has a great Ruby community" etc, to which his response was "I've no interest in living in a 3rd world country".

Notch-esque politics aside, that was mean-spirited, inconsiderate behavior which should not be applauded. From that day I strongly sensed that was who he truly was.

DHH is on Shopify's board now:

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

Shopify's support for DHH's world view makes sense. Shopify's executive team has been right-wing for a while now:

https://pressprogress.ca/shopify-executives-right-wing-media...

https://disconnect.blog/the-conservative-tech-alliance-is-co...

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

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

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

‘very fine people on both sides’ - DJT