I realize this will come off as snide, and result in downvotes, but looking to the success of Ruby and Rails today, the "community" is as much the money that's been poured into the ecosystem as it is the warm fuzzies and volunteers. Without the millions of dollars companies like Heroku, Shopify, Basecamp, Github, 37 Signals, and others have spent in terms of money and developer-hours, the projects we know and love would be in a much different place. To that end, those entities are as much the "community" as the developer who has done nothing but "gem install" and put cute stickers on their laptop.

those entities are as much the "community"

sure, but the issue is that one of these entities now demands exclusive use of something that should be shared between them and others.

saying that "this belongs to the community" doesn't mean that this entity is not part of the community, but that they don't get to exclusively own something that should be owned by everyone.

> Heroku, Shopify, Basecamp, Github, 37 Signals, and others have spent in terms of money and developer-hours

Companies are legal fictions that we allow to exist. The _people_ are the ones who did the development, management, and all the other things that had to be done.

The companies may have _paid their salaries to do so_ but there are plenty of open source communities that exist without the direct funding of work.

I can't tell what point you're trying to make here?

You're right. To me, "gem install" and "cute stickers" come off as snide remarks. Maybe that's partly because you directed those comments at someone who claims to have done major development work.

Very unclear if you read the post and understood that the author is actually a full blown OSS contributor and maintainer - and the point of the post is that they built Bundler, which Ruby Central has now “stolen”.

I'm sure the developer community would have spent the money if we'd had it, but unfortunately ROI has not trickled down quite so far as promised.