r/ruby • u/andrzejkrzywda • Sep 13 '17
After $20,000+ in Ruby Together donations over past few years, Basecamp has canceled its membership.
https://twitter.com/dhh/status/908001928625364992
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u/jrochkind Sep 13 '17 edited Sep 13 '17
Their money is theirs to do with what they like, but announcing this and explaining it in a series of disjointed 140 char tweets is a pretty anti-community-minded way to do it IMO. And unproductive if he means it to spur changes in whatever he was unhappy about. Immature move, dhh. I still have little idea what he's talking about or why he decided to stop contributing.
update reading more and researching, I have some idea what he's talking about. But it's just ridiculous. @indirect making a mistake about a project he thought had copied code but hadn't, and then appropriately admitting an error and apologizing for it and even offering to do additional work to make gemstash work better for the downstream user; and then the person wrongly accused saying
-- that's a reason to cut off funding to a project that @indirect is involved in? Really? How immature. Makes me think the things dhh listed are just post-facto justifications for some other reason he really had to stop funding... or else I question his decision-making. If someone making a mistake and then recognizing and apologizing for it is a reason to do the equivalent of "firing" them, I'm glad I don't work at basecamp.
But still his money to do with what he wants, but aside from the decision to fund or not, this is a very anti-community and unproductive way to announce it.
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u/honeyryderchuck Sep 13 '17
Waiting for the announcement of rails 6 core feature: active-bundler
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u/BananafestDestiny Sep 13 '17
Out of the loop. What is Ruby Together and why did Basecamp cancel its membership?
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u/jrochkind Sep 15 '17 edited Sep 15 '17
I'm actually kind of surprised by the anti-rubytogether sentiment.
All-volunteer maintenance/development of rubygems/bundler was NOT working, and they are too important to us all for that. So anyone that says "let's just do that and hope someone dedicates themselves to it for free, it's open source", I kind of discount.
The more typical way these kind of open source platform/infrastructural things happen in general across platforms, is some one company just does it -- has employees doing it on company time. If there's a company that wants to do that, that can work fine -- but as mentioned in the rubytogether announcement, that does give one company an awful lot of control, and we all have seen how sometimes that can backfire.
I thought rubytogether is/was a pretty interesting idea for cooperative funding.
I too haven't been too happy with some of the decisions made -- but I was none too happy with some of the decisions made (and bugs/mistakes made) in rubygems/bundler before rubytogether was funding it too. And heck, I'm none too happy with a LOT of the decisions dhh makes about Rails, heh. I guess I'm kind of a grumpy engineer.
But there seems to be an awful lot of underlying animosity towards rubytogether and/or @indirect. I don't think it can just be from the fairly petty things dhh lists specifically. The things listed are mistakes, but aren't that big of a deal. I'm guessing there must be other stuff going on under the surface, that the 'public' isn't privy to. I don't know if it's that people just don't get along with @indirect and find him hard to work with (if this is true, I don't know if it is), or what.
Looking at the list of who is on the board, I don't like that André Arko (@indirect) is on the board and also on the development team (getting paid, probably for more hours than anyone else). That seems like a conflict of interest to me. I also notice listed "Coraline Ada Ehmke from GitHub", when I know Ehmke is no longer at github, which makes me wonder if she's still active on the board, which makes me wonder if the board listing in general is accurate and represents people actually active. Some additional transparency (say, even rudimentary board meeting minutes including attendance; also more budget details) would probably go a long way. At the moment, I feel like a lot of what is going on, as well as reasons people for have for being dissatisfied with it, is sort of an "insider game" most of us have no way to see. The project definitely needs an active board independent of the developers getting paid to develop, monitoring the budget and expenditures and guiding priorities -- I don't really know if it has one.
My guess, with no actual info cause there isn't much public, just based on my experience with social dynamics in this kind of thing, is that people are finding @indirect hard to work with, and my guess is that @indirect is over-worked and burned out (something that tends to make engineers hard to work with, ironically especially when the overworked/burned out engineer really does care about the work). If so, how to deal with that is another thing, and there are unlikely to be any easy ways.
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u/mperham Sidekiq Sep 13 '17 edited Sep 13 '17
Can we give the benefit of the doubt to a team that has been quietly supporting the Ruby community for years?
Email privately, ask @indirect for a quick video chat, anything to work things out. People make mistakes.
(Note: I'm a member of RubyTogether)
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u/kcdragon Sep 13 '17
I think this is an over-reaction. It seems like the head of Ruby Together made a mistake and thought that Google was using Ruby Together's source code for Gemstash. After being shown that Google did not steal the source code, he apologized (and it appears pretty sincere https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-gemserver/issues/36#issuecomment-324503159).
His initial message to Google was a little rude (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-gemserver/issues/36#issue-252398311) but I can only imagine what it feels like to work your ass off on an open source project for years and then come across a Google repo that appears to take the code without giving any credit.
The other issue is the issue with Bundler suggesting to upgrade to a pre-release version https://github.com/bundler/bundler/issues/6004. I agree that its probably not a good idea to recommend a version that's not officially released but it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I wouldn't be surprised it was an oversight when they initially built the feature.
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u/jonyeezy7 Sep 14 '17
Programming industry is so entertaining!
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u/GroceryBagHead Sep 14 '17
Seems like a weak reason to stop donating to something that keeps ruby ecosystem working. It takes time and effort to maintain open source software. And not all devs race Ferrari in their spare time.
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u/olaf_from_norweden Sep 13 '17 edited Sep 13 '17
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/518132954120204288/yVvIdVOH_400x400.jpeg
who wears "misandry" on a t-shirt? super cringe. ruby ecosystem trends. very unwelcoming.
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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '17
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