From what I can tell, this story is primarily about personalities. The community essentially ended up with several factions, but I’ll try to explain this without it degenerating into the schoolyard fighting that it appears to be.

1. Ruby Central is the surviving Ruby non-profit that another Ruby non-profit, Ruby Together merged with. This is where part of the legal ambiguity/dispute comes from that will make sense in (2).

2. RubyGems (the code, GitHub repo, etc) and RubyGems.org are two separate things. RubyGems code appears to not have been legally transferred in the merger. RubyGems.org is run by Ruby Central, but this transfer is also extremely muddy.

3. For reasons in dispute, Ruby Central seized the GitHub repos of RubyGems. It is not clear they have the legal or ethical right to do this (based on the evidence, I believe they do not and they have committed theft).

4. Ruby Central has made various noises about the need to do this for security and other things despite the extremely sloppy nature of the takeover.

5. Ruby Central then “gave” RubyGems to the Ruby core team without resolving anything in what appears to be an attempt to try and end the controversy.

In the background of all of this appears to be a lack of trust, dhh posting crap like this: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64, resulting in a fight about the future of the Ruby ecosystem.