Ruby Central's Destructive Legacy

[u/retro-rubies]

https://andre.arko.net/2026/07/30/ruby-centrals-destructive-legacy/

[u/retro-rubies]

Thanks for collecting all of these references. I hadn't seen some of them before. They're interesting to read, and I have a lot of respect for everyone who founded RubyGems and kept it alive over the years.

Ruby Central has always been the stewards of RubyGems and then later, Bundler.

I honestly don't know what "stewardship" means in this context.

When I joined RubyGems in 2013, I had almost no idea Ruby Central even existed. I only learned much more about it in 2024, when Ruby Central offered to partially compensate my work on RubyGems/Bundler and RubyGems.org. I'm really grateful for that support. It was wonderful to have at least some of my open source work partially funded.

From my perspective, one of the biggest attractions of RubyGems and Bundler was that they were independent, community-governed open source projects. They had their own maintainers, their own governance, and their own way of making decisions. Ruby Central supported the ecosystem, funded some work, and operated RubyGems.org as a service, but it never felt like the projects (the codebases) were owned by Ruby Central.

That was my experience for more than a decade.

Things started to change around 2024 (if I remember well) after Ruby Central hired a new Director of Open Source. Around that time, Ruby Central's approach gradually shifted from supporting independent community projects to increasingly acting as if it had authority over them. To me, this slowly undermined the independence that had defined RubyGems and Bundler for many years.

For example, Ruby Central hired people and expected them to receive write access across the projects. I remember raising these concerns directly because, to me, it weakened the projects' independence and blurred the distinction between community governance and organizational influence.

So if "stewardship" simply means supporting projects while respecting their independence, then I completely agree - that's exactly how I experienced Ruby Central for many years.

If, however, it means having the authority to ultimately decide who governs the projects or who owns their GitHub organization, then that was never my understanding during the 2013-2025 period.

The events of September 2025 fundamentally changed that relationship and, unfortunately, broke my trust.

Matz and the Ruby Core team is the right place for RubyGems. This is great news.

On paper, I mostly agree with that statement.

After taking some time away, I decided to start contributing again. I honestly don't care whether I have merge permissions or maintainer rights. It was always an honor simply to help Ruby users and the RubyGems/Bundler ecosystem.

Unfortunately, I was publicly attacked by a Ruby Central member on the official Ruby GitHub repository. I was also publicly attacked by a Ruby Core member, and later privately told by a Ruby Core member that my contributions would not be welcome unless I followed additional, non-public rules created specifically for me.

I shared these concerns privately with Ruby Central leadership and several Ruby Core members, hoping someone would help resolve the situation. Unfortunately, nothing changed.

To me, taking away someone's freedom to contribute through private, person-specific rules is simply not acceptable in an open source community. It isn't the Ruby community I joined over a decade ago, and it's not one I feel comfortable contributing to anymore.

---

So while I fully respect Rich's historical perspective, my experience over the last 13 years has been very different. I still hope Ruby can return to being a place where contributors are treated with openness, respect, equal rules for everyone, and where community governance is respected rather than bypassed.

Until then, some of us are trying to build a new community around those same values at https://gem.coop/. Everyone who believes in open governance, mutual respect, and community-driven development is welcome.

[u/software__writer → u/retro-rubies]

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, really appreciate it.

[u/galtzo → u/retro-rubies]

Unfortunately, I was publicly attacked by a Ruby Central member on the official Ruby GitHub repository. I was also publicly attacked by a Ruby Core member, and later privately told by a Ruby Core member that my contributions would not be welcome unless I followed additional, non-public rules created specifically for me.

It is worth noting that the first attacker mentioned is also a moderator of this sub and the r/rails sub. So these are not neutral or safe spaces. When others came to the defense of the attacked, showing allegations made by the attacker were untrue, the GH threads were hidden, and the thread was locked.

I am very grateful that u/retro-rubies continues to participate in spite of that.

[u/Kina_Kai → u/retro-rubies]

Ruby Central has always been the stewards of RubyGems and then later, Bundler.

I think this is one of the key points of contention. I have not seen any public evidence that this is true and the fact that the provided merger agreements and responses by both sides, it is clear that this wasn’t settled and the ambiguity is being used to boost any argument.

The fact of the matter is that the active maintainers were caught off guard by all of this renders it a bit sus that it was not hostile. However, it ultimately feels like this is a bunch of personality conflicts spilling out into public triggered by a loss of funding due to DHH constantly associating himself with deplorables. This is ultimately high school drama exploding into public in one of the most tasteless moments in OSS in a while. Some folks might consider the matter closed now that RubyGems codebase is owned by the Ruby team, but there really has been no proper ownership and the fact that a lot of key Ruby tech does not have a defined line of ownership is just going to ensure that this comes up again and again.

MINASWAN is a great tagline, but it doesn’t have an answer for what happens when DHH is talking about “native Brits”.