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A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

104 points by Qwuke 1y ago

corytheboyd 1y ago
Very reasonable other side to this story, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Too bad it didn’t hit the front page. People went WAY too far WAY too fast on this. There HAS to be urgency to this, the software supply chain is presently, undeniably, under attack. Frankly, everyone blasting RubyCentral the last few days should feel shame and embarrassment. These aren’t evil suits at Microsoft, they’re normal people invested in maintaining a critical piece of infrastructure for the good of all who love and profit from Ruby.
- jaredcwhite 1y ago
  What? This article is absolutely damning re: RC's leadership and the utter lack of proper transparency, strategic planning, marketing/PR, and solid OSS governance. Did we read the same article?!
  - picadi 1y ago
    i read the article, but didn't see anything damning about it. how big of a staff do you think a tiny 501c3 like RubyCentral is? RC shepherds a pretty small community around a niche DSL with a shoestring non-profit budget that mostly goes towards running conferences.. you can see their financial reports here https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/300040446 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/300... expectations around "strategic planning" and "marketing/PR" are not realistic. You should just be glad these randos don't have admin access to the Github org anymore. Any one of them were huge targets for adversaries who want to ship malware in Rubygems, supply chain attacks are very real and having commit access directly to rubygems/bundler is too powerful for a rando. my main takeaway from reading all this is why were so many assorted people given such high levels of access..
    - nightpool 1y ago
      "These randos" are our friends and fellow contributors. Probably everybody in the Ruby community has worked with theme in one capacity or another. The article provides no reason why they should have had their contribution permissions revoked. Just because you think of Ruby as a "niche DSL" and the people maintaining its core infrastructure as "randos" doesn't mean the rest of us do.
      - nenenejej 1y ago
        I'm for least privildge and tightening up perms, reviewing who has access. But it just needed some comms and timeline. Unless there was an obvious immediate threat.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - picadi 1y ago
        just because someone is a nice community member doesn't mean they deserve rewrite-the-commit history admin level access to rubygems and bundler. they can be great committers even without the ego boost of knowing you hold the keys to get a ton of companies hacked without interference. also, if you step back, Ruby's problem is it consists of a fading community of millenials and Gen Xers who first came to Rails when it was the best/coolest option. however with the majority of builders now turning to JS for web, Rust (and Go) for systems, and Python for ML, it doesn't have a use case anymore that can drive a community or any hope for growth in the future. so a "niche DSL" for legacy webapps and plugin systems is what's left IMO, but i'm sorry for being super frank about it languages like this with a shrinking community and loose security policies pose around the centralized package management system pose high security risks to its users.
        nightpool 1y ago
        I'm not saying that they're just "a nice community member", I'm saying that they're the ones doing the work. They're not randos, they're trusted maintainers in the ecosystem with a proven track record. After the purge, rubygems and Bundler has only one active maintainer, one who's splitting his time between Rails, Ruby core, and many other open source projects. The bundler and gem-specific experts have been removed, and we've gone from a bus factor of 4-5 to a bus factor of 1. This is much, much more unacceptable then the theoretical risk of a trusted, active maintainer with 10+ years of community experience suddenly deciding to go rogue and rewrite history (has this ever happened in the history of a supply chain attack?) Also, commit access to Github doesn't even say anything about access to deploying the actual package on rubygems. If security really was the goal, there were a million less invasive ways to make this change then revoking commit access from the active maintainers. Set up branch protections, require approvals, etc. There are a lot more tools in the toolbox other than "remove all of the maintainers".
  - corytheboyd 1y ago
    Honestly I don’t know how to feel about it anymore, but I found the rhetoric way too explosive at the time, when nothing was really known. Now that some time has passed, and more has been said… yeah I get your point too. Ruby has been a HUGE part of building my career, I don’t want to see it slide away one questionable move at a time into full corporate control. It’s not TOO hard to see how this whole thing could just be step one of that :/
    - phatskat 1y ago
      I hate this for the community - I’m an outsider, who always wanted to give Ruby (and Rails) a good swing. However, after this, and after learning about dhh’s awful (imo) stances, I’m not ever going to go near any of it. I had a similar “yuck” when WPEngine started taking Mullenweg to task over all of the WordPress shenanigans - that hit a lot closer to home for me, as I’ve spent about half of my career building great sites and applications on top of Wordpress. Although I’ve moved on, I was still an active contributor on the WP StackExchange and had my ear to the ground in several plugin repos I authored for employers who contributed to Five for the Future, and replied to comments on blog posts from people who found my previous insights helpful. I have zero interest to ever go back to that project because of how poorly it’s been managed - if you want to see one man completely wreck an open-source ecosystem, it’s quite a fascinating if not depressing story.
nightpool 1y ago
So Ruby Central, by their own admission, agreed to take $$$$$ of funding on the premise that they would "secure RubyGems against supply chain attacks", and then sat on their hands not doing anything about it until a few days before the deadline, when it was too late to seek community consensus or figure out a good transition plan. So they ended up screwing over everybody who was actually doing work on the project in favor of their own funding. And also they apparently used this as an opportunity to consolidate their power in other ways (renaming the github org) for reasons that were unrelated to the self-imposed deadline. How does this make them look better?
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  To my untrained eye it looks like a board with a bunch of money and perhaps a fork on their hands.
  - phatskat 1y ago
    This definitely has a Mullenweg-esque scent to it.
pmontra 1y ago
> [The Ruby Central board] is a small group of volunteers is somewhat at odds with > Some [...] companies specifically pay Ruby Central to ensure the security and stability of that part of the supply chain, but not so much. Then the sentence goes on with > but then discovered that people with no active affiliation or agreement in place had top level privileges to some of this critical infrastructure. So something has been wrongly managed or wrongly sold. Then the final part about the emotional conversations and the dilemma sounds honest or at least very plausible, but as they write, the critical mistake already happened.
- brianm 1y ago
  Not really -- non-profit boards are usually volunteers, even ion the non-profit has revenue used for operations.
kg 1y ago
> I can't speak for the board or the Ruby Central staff. But I know them and they are like me. They do this because they love Ruby and our community. I'm certain of that. I don't know how to reconcile 'they love Ruby and our community' with moves that are actively hostile to the community.
- hatthew 1y ago
  > [do what we did], or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going Seems pretty clear-cut to me.
eutropia 1y ago
I think that if they had been up front and transparent, and cut the PR bullshit corpospeak from their damage-control post, this would have been something that's much less embarrassing for all involved. Something like: "Hey all, RC here: with the very real threat of supply-chain attacks looming around us, one of the critical financial backers of our nonprofit org gave us a deadline around tightening access to the Github Account for rubygems/bundler. We tried and failed to arrive at a consensus with the open-source volunteers and maintainers for the best path forward and were forced to make a decision between losing the funding and taking decisive (if ham-fisted) action to keep Ruby Central financially healthy. We think RC's continued work is important enough that we stand by our decision, upsetting though it might be, but want to work out a better one ASAP. We are genuinely sorry for any fear/disruption this has caused." Something simple that just owns the fact that they screwed up and tried to handle it as best they could. Doing this proactively as soon as they made the changes and broadcasting it would have been even better, but even posting this in reply to the controversy would have done more imo...
- adriand 1y ago
  Sounds like you should volunteer for Ruby Central to help them with their communications! I don't mean that facetiously: it seems that they could use you, or someone like you, with comms. As the OP readily admits, this is not a strong point for them. My general take on this: 1) Nerds are often not the best at communicating. 2) People on the Internet can be very cruel towards people they don't know. We could all do better, especially with #2. The Internet used to be cool as hell. Now, by and large, it sucks.
  - gsinclair 1y ago
    The organisation already has non-technical people employed. They should be able to get basic communications right.
- nenenejej 1y ago
  This has the advantage of being short and so take way less brainpower to piece what actually happened. Reading between lines is exhausting.
baggy_trough 1y ago
Locking out a guy like David Rodriguez (the main person I see doing bundler commits) in a dramatic fashion just seems like absolute craziness. I can't fathom doing it without a very good reason, which has yet to be revealed if it exists.
- padjo 1y ago
  Does “lest we lose critical funding because we don’t have proper agreements with our committers” not cut it as a reason for you? Genuinely curious, it seems like a reasonable explanation assuming it’s true.
  - generalk 1y ago
    It does not, for me. Given that access was cut, then restored, then cut again, then days, then someone finally says "hey were were going to lose critical funding" makes it seem like a post-facto excuse for a hostile takeover. And the whole "oh, well, we're bad at comms" makes it sound even worse! Which is the whole crux of the issue. At no point in any of this did Ruby Central do anything reasonable. The they tried to explain that their unreasonable actions were reasonable, if you only knew the things they knew, which they were for some reason unable to tell people until just now. Could it be true? Sure, absolutely. Does it seem reasonable at the moment? Hell no.
    - lloeki 1y ago
      From TFA: > Let's get some kind of committer agreement in place with those folks who need access (the same way many other high profile open source projects have), and remove access from those who don't, while still being fully open to accepting PRs and being open to re-welcoming them as committers if they decide that is how they want to spend their time in the future. > Here's the challenge. How do you tell someone that has had commit and admin access to critical infrastructure long after that need has expired that you need to revoke that access without upsetting them? deivid-rodriguez's last commits were Sept 18: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits/master/?since=2025-09-18&until=2025-09-22 https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits/master/?since=2... With 7873 commits since 2018 he's 2x over the second one and crushingly the most active contributor since then: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/graphs/contributors https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/graphs/contributors However you slice it, none of that fits into TFA's above narrative. His access being revoked can only be described as complete bonkers.
qrush 1y ago
I'm truly hoping for a reasonable resolution on all sides for this situation. IMO Ruby is too small, and shrinking compared to Python and JS/TS especially in the AI era, to be able to afford any splintering of efforts.
- rubiest2010 1y ago
  Agreed. I wish the communications would move away from FUD that could scare people away from using Ruby when things are already splintered. A more honest and transparent accounting of what really happened is necessary.
- bradly 1y ago
  I still remember your The Legal Stuff post on Google Groups from a million years ago. <3
throwaway346434 1y ago
It's such a weird thought process to have gone through, to write this. The sentiments expressed are basically: "I WANT to apologize ... that I feel awful." "How can you possibly talk to someone about changing access, when multiple people tell you no, you are wrong?! A coup is the only way!" "Because funding deadline, we executed a coup, which will keep everyone safe from hostile actors... Taking over accounts and access"
- delichon 1y ago
  > Ruby Central has been responsible for RubyGems and Bundler for a long time. This isn't a new development, and I'm honestly very confused about the confusion. That's the opposite claim from a coup. It's not fair for you to put those words in his mouth.
  - throwaway346434 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - delichon 1y ago
      He is claiming that Ruby Central has the authority. True or not, that claim is not consistent with a coup. You seem to be catastrophizing and constructing misleading quotes, including inverting his words, not because his claim is not true but because of how he communicated it and the impact of it.
      - throwaway346434 1y ago
        My point is that he chose to communicate the way he did; it is poorly thought out and extremely difficult to accept as an explanation. Objective tests you yourself can perform. 1) How much of the publication talks about himself? Why is that relevant? 2) How much does it directly provide links, context, history? Can you find the opposing point of view directly linked from it, or is it omitted? 3) From reading the content, does this person represent the board, or not? Do they make any conflicting claims that are difficult to both be true at the same time? 4) A coup d'etat is a "a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government" Were the people who lost access acting as a governing body? Was the loss of access sudden and unexpected? Did the loss of access follow any of the rules of the governing group? Did the loss of access harm individuals? With the answers to the above, reflect on the following: Why would someone write about themselves, their experience, etc for 6 paragraphs? Would you say it is clear they have only been appointed since Jan 2025? Or are they trying to establish themselves as an authority? If they are not attempting to appeal to authority, why is it relevant? Did they actually apologise? If so, to who? Is it specific? Does it clearly articulate what the person did, admit fault, recognise harm? Or is there downplaying of impact, vague language, downplaying of involvement? Does it characterise the contrary point of view in a way that trivial uses the concerns? Are the conversations "emotional" or is it implied the people experiencing the negative act are? Is the author emotional? If you were the person or people affected, would you accept this explanation? If you were the person taking these actions, would you explain why like this? Why or why not? I strongly encourage you to do this exercise, putting aside feelings or initial responses even if you think I am wrong.
sc68cal 1y ago
This story is missing any context around what occurred. The only thing I was able to find was by searching, and I came to this PDF statement. https://pup-e.com/goodbye-rubygems.pdf https://pup-e.com/goodbye-rubygems.pdf > On September 9th, with no warning or communication, a RubyGems maintainer unilaterally: > renamed the “RubyGems” GitHub enterprise to “Ruby Central”, > added non-maintainer Marty Haught of Ruby Central, and > removed every other maintainer of the RubyGems project. > On September 18th, with no explanation, Marty Haught revoked GitHub organization membership for all admins on the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org maintainer teams Which is important context that was left out of this board member's statement.
- jtbayly 1y ago
  It was not left out of the statement. I understood that was essentially what happened by the time I got to the end of his piece. The only exception being the “with no warning or communication” part. Obviously there is disagreement about whether that is true or not.
- caymanjim 1y ago
  Everything you're quoting is from one aggrieved person, who clearly felt slighted, and who left out a whole lot of context in their own post. The article above is a lot more reasoned, less emotional, and seems completely reasonable to me. Ruby Central clearly has issues with both internal and external communication. And the above article isn't an official statement either; it's just one person, not involve in the decision, offering another perspective.
  - throwaway346434 1y ago
    It's not just one person. Between the initial removal of access, then giving it back after explaining it was a mistake; the people involved started a conversation about governance to clarify/fix things. https://github.com/rubygems/rfcs/pull/61 https://github.com/rubygems/rfcs/pull/61 The conversation terminated because the majority of those people then had their access revoked again. When weighing the facts here; which group or claimant has the most evidence for their claims? The technical folks with lots of commits over many years, or the treasurer of an organisation who says the impetus for this was a "funding deadline" so all access had to be seized?
kragen 1y ago
I don't know more about the controversy than what's explained here, but, reading between the lines, it sounds like companies want Ruby Central to operate more like a for-profit company, where people carry out defined tasks in exchange for getting paid, than like a jury or the American Medical Association, where people do what seems best to them in exchange for a harder-to-define sense of collective social obligation. (When they work, of course; sometimes those institutions don't work very well.) I am skeptical that the model where people carry out defined tasks in exchange for getting paid can properly discharge the obligations of trustworthiness and disinterest that are necessary for the proper functioning of software supply chains. I'm thinking that probably people whose motivation is primarily personal gain will seek out ways to exploit their users' trust for additional personal gain, for example by bundling adware and other malware into their software the way Microsoft does with Windows, or only releasing security updates to paying customers. Open-source licensing provides some protection against this problem, because it guarantees you the legal right to switch to a non-malicious fork; but the whole reason we're talking about open-source supply chain security in the first place is that your vulnerability to your chosen upstream is still far from nonzero.
- hluska 1y ago
  > reading between the lines, it sounds like companies want Ruby Central to operate more like a for-profit company, where people carry out defined tasks in exchange for getting paid, than like a jury or the American Medical Association, where people do what seems best to them in exchange for a harder-to-define sense of collective social obligation. There was a funding agreement which imposed obligations upon the operators. Those obligations were to be sure that supply chain attacks were reasonably secured against. The volunteers didn’t have to sign that agreement - they chose to and received consideration for their decision to sign. Licensing terms don’t change the underlying mechanism of a contract and the message is even easier. If your organization cannot abide by the terms of a contract, don’t sign it.
andersmurphy 1y ago
> Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going. Seems pretty clear after reading this. If 1-2 companies pulling funding is enough for them to force you to to what they want, its hard to stay independent.
decasia 1y ago
Agreeing with most of the other comments here that this discussion needs more context which we don't have... If the request for additional access controls/access cleanup came from one of the Ruby Central funders, could we not know who that was and what exactly their ask consisted of? I am interested in knowing their side of the story, and what the motivation was. (But in general, cutting off long-time maintainers' access seems like a bad choice - as presumably they have long since proven their good will toward the ruby community as shepherds of these projects.)
reenorap 1y ago
The only reason why Ruby and other open source projects survive is because large companies can trust them to do the right thing. Given the critical nature of the supply chain attacks, what the board did was 100% right. Like he said, some people's egos got hurt but if no one can trust the maintainers, then Ruby has no future in the industry and it will die quickly. This is basically like fixing technical debt. It's painful and it's political but sometimes you have to do the right thing for the community as opposed to trying to assuage individuals' egos.
- blibble 1y ago
  was it even their project? just because they host it doesn't mean it's theirs my webhost doesn't own the community around my projects simply because it's on their server
- khamidou 1y ago
  I think you got things mixed up, open source projects survive because volunteers believe in them and want to contribute to them. Large companies rarely get involved, occasionally with some funding. It sounds like they sold something to their donors they couldn't really guarantee – supply chain safety – and they decided to alienate their contributors to try to appease them. Only time will tell if this was really damaging to the ruby community or just a temporary hurdle
  - dewey 1y ago
    Look at the core maintainers of Rails for example. Many are paid by Shopify and Basecamp, so it’s much more commercial than your regular open source project. Which isn’t a bad thing that people get to contribute on company time.
    - khamidou 1y ago
      Again this is mixed causality. Rails did not take off because of commercial interests – besides dhh who was working on it on the side, all the initial committers were doing that for fun. Eventually they brought rails in many commercial companies and these companies succeeded to the point they could pay people to maintain rails.
nyeah 1y ago
[flagged]
- phatskat 1y ago
  I think a lot of people did read the OP and were left wanting - I know I did and was. Breaking down the posted article, there’s a lot missing (which the author admits), and it’s not clear really what the goal of the post was other than to say “someone, not me, made an oops. But it’s fine, right, because the community needed this to happen.” Parts that were particularly odd, that others have said with better words: - Who imposed this ultimatum on RC? - How long was the timeline to “tighten things up”? It sounds like there was both a decent amount of time and an immediate urgency - it can’t be both. - “We’re nerds who can’t communicate well” (paraphrased) is such a poor argument - I get it, I’ve had to do a lot of work to figure out how to navigate social spaces and how to communicate effectively in professional settings. That said, the author is writing as if they’ve never had a single conversation with a technical person that they didn’t know well; that any conversation about removing or reducing access would be a catastrophe. That’s ridiculous. It seems that either there was poor planning around this, or someone forgot about the deadline and YOLO’d it, or there was a malicious push to oust some of the biggest contributors under the guise of security. One thing is clear, regardless of what the root cause of this all was: RC showed a deep lack of respect for the people that make their community what it is, and that stinks.
akk0 1y ago
So basically they're a bunch of serfs
vintagedave 1y ago
> A deadline (which as far as I understand, we agreed to) loomed. Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going. This makes a lot of sense, and it puts the 'drastic' action in understandable light. It also contrasts with the 'On September 9th, with no warning or communication, a RubyGems maintainer unilaterally...' from the Goodbye RubyGems letter. Perhaps that person did not have communications or insight? Going forward I think we could judge the good faith, if it's uncertain, by if we do see people reinstated. Cutting off access (for urgency with a deadline) followed by reinstatement (because they contribute) would match this post. No doubt there will be hurt feelings on all sides, which is understandable, but I hope as humans everyone can get through it.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  Pretty sure github issues would enligghten everyone on the timely communication of funding requirements
hyperpape 1y ago
A lot of people are arguing about whether locking down access was justified to resolve the security issues. I guess it's debatable. But I don't see any excuse for not putting out a statement when you do it. You have to know there will be a fight, and you will look like the bad guy. Perhaps I could see directly communicating to the maintainers that you expect that they'll be reinstated. But to say nothing? To let the post by duckinator float around for days without having a "we did this because of security concerns, we want to work together and find a resolution..." It's incomprehensible that they thought this would go well.
- nenenejej 1y ago
  I mean imagine you are at work and you need to so this for SOC2 or something but dont tell your colleagues.
  - danielheath 1y ago
    Firstly, you can tell them you’re working on SOC2 compliance, and secondly, those colleagues are getting paid in dollars, not doing it for the love of the work.
    - nenenejej 1y ago
      > Firstly, you can tell them you’re working on SOC2 compliance Bingo
mpalmer 1y ago
For any company that wants to secure and maintain critical source infrastructure for a language, community/maintainer relations is a fundamental responsibility. It is not to be waved away with quasi-candid admissions that you're just too small a team, too technical, etc. Even if this board member is being totally sincere about his feelings for Ruby and its community, it changes little. > Some of those companies specifically pay Ruby Central to ensure the security and stability of that part of the supply chain, but then discovered that people with no active affiliation or agreement in place had top level privileges to some of this critical infrastructure. This is the most candid bit of the article. RubyCentral seems to have screwed up. The sense I get after reading this paragraph is that RC's non-apologies about poor communication are smoke. Why did they have to move this quickly/silently? Well... If you are taking money from businesses in exchange for certain assurances about the security/soundness of RubyGems, you have a responsibility the minute pen leaves paper to KYC(ontributors). Not when there's suddenly a fire, or when your clients notice. By all appearances, RC was negligent, if not necessarily in the legal sense. They were highly reactive in response to a problem they should have been across already, and they have paid for it with a chunk of the Ruby community's trust. To now retcon this action as poorly-communicated but ultimately noble and security-minded does not sit very well.
rubiest2010 1y ago
This is a reasonable perspective but leaves a lot of unanswered questions and creates more questions. Who is the funder threatening to pull funding and why were they not more collaborative or flexible with Ruby Central? Did they know that this is how their request would be handled? How much information and what information did Board members have when making their votes? One thing that hasn’t been addressed is who was responsible for communications and implementation of this. It says here that the Director of Open Source did what the Board asked of him. Outside of the Board, which as stated here were heads down and trying to problem solve, Ruby Central’s website also shows a staff of several non-technical employees. Prominently, there is an Executive Director with a background in communications and non profit work per their LinkedIn. Where was this Executive Director and the other staff members during this? Were they involved with decision making and communication around this? How involved was the Board of Directors in implementation after the decision was made? It is a hollow statement to say they are just technical people trying to problem solve when there appears to be a whole team of non-technical staff members and an executive specializing in communications. Something clearly went wrong here and there are a lot of missing pieces around what happened after the vote took place. Most of this could have been mitigated with standard processes and simply communicating to maintainers and the community.
- rubiest2010 1y ago
  To add, did Ruby Central consider going to the community and asking for funding so they wouldn’t have to be beholden to one or a small group of key funders? If they were at risk of shutting down without this funding source I think the community might have rallied around them so they could make more independent decisions in the best interests of the community. This is not to say that they didn’t act in the best interests of the community by tightening security, but an organization of this nature should be able to act more independently.
  - hluska 1y ago
    This program is public and has been for a very long time - it’s called the Community Support Program because Windows devs don’t have enough nightmares of the acronym CSP. Do you contribute? I can send you a link if you don’t.
anyonecancode 1y ago
What I'm missing is what, if any, communication Ruby Central had with maintainers. > How do you tell someone that has had commit and admin access to critical infrastructure long after that need has expired that you need to revoke that access without upsetting them? Start by letting go of the goal of not upsetting them. Make sure you do communicate clearly. Just say what you said a paragraph earlier: open source ecosystems, including ours, are increasingly suffering supply chain attacks. To guard against this, we need to tighten access that has traditionally been fairly loose. Starting <date>, we're going to remove general access and ask that contributors sign <link to agreement> before re-enabling access. I mean, maybe that is what happened -- as the OP says, he wasn't part of the conversations so can't say. From the earlier public posts, it doesn't _sound_ like that's what happened. But I'd say as a general rule, it's important to communicate disruptive changes ahead of time to those affected and give a clear path to how they can mitigate the disruption.
nenenejej 1y ago
I hate the style of write up. It feels a bit gaslightly (it may or may not be but feels like it). And defensive. Just drop all the facts. Acknowledge you fucked up. Or dont say anything at all? A board position means responsibility not just "head down coding". And that means communicating with people. For clarity I wasnt super keen on the original submission this is responding to, for similar reasons.
thomascountz 1y ago
I think that most Rubyists want to forgive each other and move forward. The board, staff, and volunteers at Ruby Central are all people and people are fallible, that's fine. The way to receive forgiveness isn't to convince others (who weren't there and who don't have the full context) that what was done was reasonable or justified. It doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter who is at fault. What matters is who will take responsibility. The actions taken by people in service of Ruby Central have had unintended consequences, including damaging the community's trust in Ruby Central's stewardship. A new governance model will solve only the problem of there not being a governance model. There also has to be an acknowledgment that the lack of an existing appropriate governance model wasn't just a "fiduciary failure," but a failure which cased harm to the community and contributors. Contributors who—like the board—are volunteers, and would have probably liked to have their significant dedication shown more respect. You show respect to someone by giving them important information from which they can use to make their own decisions. As opposed to withholding information because you are uncomfortable with the possibility that they may make a decision you don't want them to.
- mikeg8 1y ago
  Best comment I’ve seen on this thread so far.
skywhopper 1y ago
Honestly this description makes me even more concerned. There’s a lot of “I don’t know what happened” and “I wasn’t involved” and “apparently we agreed to”. In particular, after a long winded introduction and setting of the scene, suddenly there’s a mention out of the blue of a 24 hour deadline to cut off access or face losing funding (forever)? But who was holding this deadline over the board’s head is not explained (in fact the author doesn’t seem to know???). Overall this just reinforces the impression that the RC board handled this sloppily and in a rushed manner, and failed to communicate with long term community members, and thought of themselves as the only parties who mattered, while not taking responsibility for holding such an important position (see the opening paragraphs about how “we don’t have time to communicate to the public because we’re busy programmers without a PR team”).
- lightbritefight 1y ago
  The poster is the treasurer too. How can he not know where the money is coming from and what constraints its beholden to? Wildly unprofessional or just willful lying.
Mystery-Machine 1y ago
Here's a little bit of nitpicking: > I want to apologize, genuinely, to people who have felt (...) outrage (...) after reading some of what others have shared. He's apologizing for what others have shared, not for what they (Ruby Central) did. > I often go out of my way to avoid making people feel bad "I'm the good guy." > and so to be part of what's caused so much chaos lately has really been awful. "_I_ feel awful." "I'm sorry for what others have said about what we _did_. I feel awful for people being outraged" Amazing. > this is a small group of volunteers spread out all over the globe. (...) It's just us. You didn't, for a single moment, think about notifying the people involved that you are removing them? It's the very first thing to do - notify someone who's involved of the change in their status. If your communication skills didn't reach a level in which you thought that would be the thing to do, I don't know what to tell you. > It is really boring stuff. So why do I do it? So what? Should we feel sorry for you? > I love the community. I love the people who use Ruby, (...) I love the people who give their time to Ruby and I love the people and companies who generously provide financial support for Ruby. Cool. > I can't speak for the board or the Ruby Central staff. But (...) proceeds to speak for the board and the Ruby Central staff. > Ruby Central has been responsible for RubyGems and Bundler for a long time. This is a lie. RubyGems and Bundler have been maintained by a group of core maintainers. Some members of this group were also Ruby Central staff, but not all. > It's not a new story that Ruby Central has been working on (or trying to at least) improve the governance model for Bundler and RubyGems. It's a new story to me. If it's not a new story, do you mind sharing some links to past discussions? > How do you tell someone that has had commit and admin access to critical infrastructure long after that need has expired that you need to revoke that access without upsetting them? You learn some basic English. And then let them know. It's called communication. > And what if other people who do still need that access claim things like "If you remove their access, I'll just add it back" or "If you remove their access, I'll quit". It's called consensus. And communication. You talk. You speak with people. And then you agree on a decision. > These are emotional conversations. Yes, they are. Is that why we shouldn't have them? When you want to leave your wife, do you just leave? What a strong person with strong values. > I wasn't a part of them and can't actually speak to the content of the conversations or how they were handled. Bad. They were handled bad. Why did you write this post? You don't have information, you don't know what happened...you just love people and community and companies. Happy happy joy joy. > we don't have a "communications team" You don't need a communications team. You just need to have a communication channel public or private, where you can reach all of the core members. It could be an email with everyone in CC. > A deadline (which as far as I understand, we agreed to) loomed. If you're not sure whether it was agreed on, again, communication. Learn how to communicate. Which deadline? Who set this deadline? > With less than 24 hours to go Did someone give you 24 hours deadline? Why wasn't this discussed long before the deadline? > Marty, Ruby Central's Director of Open Source How the f is Marty? If he wasn't one of RubyGems maintainers, why is he suddenly being put as the main maintainer? Aside from communication issues, you also have decision making issues. All of the core members should come to an agreement, without Marty. > I love this community and I love Ruby. Cool. Please find some time to read a book or two on communication skills. As well as decision making. Read the comments in this thread. Ignore mine, don't think too much about it. Just read other comments. Then think again about your decision and to which percentage people in this thread agree with it. And perhaps reevaluate it.
cratermoon 1y ago
Money. It's all about money. This is the only sentence from the post worth reading: "Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going"
mikemcquaid 1y ago
I’m the Homebrew Project leader and care a lot about Ruby so met with both sides to attempt to mediate and posted two threads on Bluesky about what went down: https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lz7klsyue22f https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lz7klsyue22f https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lzfxctubbk2y https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lzfxctubbk2y TL;DR: Regardless of what you think of RubyCentral’s actions, it’s very clear they absolutely screwed up the execution and communication here. In general the transparency is far below what you’d expect from an open source organisation.
renewiltord 1y ago
Christ what a clusterfuck. I only use Ruby because of Rails so whatever DHH says I'll go with. If he says this is bogus it's bogus, otherwise it's not bogus.
SuperNinKenDo 1y ago
Tl;dr: corporate coup.
gregorymichael 1y ago
This seems super reasonable.

104 points by Qwuke 1y ago

Very reasonable other side to this story, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Too bad it didn’t hit the front page. People went WAY too far WAY too fast on this. There HAS to be urgency to this, the software supply chain is presently, undeniably, under attack. Frankly, everyone blasting RubyCentral the last few days should feel shame and embarrassment. These aren’t evil suits at Microsoft, they’re normal people invested in maintaining a critical piece of infrastructure for the good of all who love and profit from Ruby.

jaredcwhite 1y ago
What? This article is absolutely damning re: RC's leadership and the utter lack of proper transparency, strategic planning, marketing/PR, and solid OSS governance. Did we read the same article?!
- picadi 1y ago
  i read the article, but didn't see anything damning about it. how big of a staff do you think a tiny 501c3 like RubyCentral is? RC shepherds a pretty small community around a niche DSL with a shoestring non-profit budget that mostly goes towards running conferences.. you can see their financial reports here https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/300040446 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/300... expectations around "strategic planning" and "marketing/PR" are not realistic. You should just be glad these randos don't have admin access to the Github org anymore. Any one of them were huge targets for adversaries who want to ship malware in Rubygems, supply chain attacks are very real and having commit access directly to rubygems/bundler is too powerful for a rando. my main takeaway from reading all this is why were so many assorted people given such high levels of access..
  - nightpool 1y ago
    "These randos" are our friends and fellow contributors. Probably everybody in the Ruby community has worked with theme in one capacity or another. The article provides no reason why they should have had their contribution permissions revoked. Just because you think of Ruby as a "niche DSL" and the people maintaining its core infrastructure as "randos" doesn't mean the rest of us do.
    - nenenejej 1y ago
      I'm for least privildge and tightening up perms, reviewing who has access. But it just needed some comms and timeline. Unless there was an obvious immediate threat.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - picadi 1y ago
      just because someone is a nice community member doesn't mean they deserve rewrite-the-commit history admin level access to rubygems and bundler. they can be great committers even without the ego boost of knowing you hold the keys to get a ton of companies hacked without interference. also, if you step back, Ruby's problem is it consists of a fading community of millenials and Gen Xers who first came to Rails when it was the best/coolest option. however with the majority of builders now turning to JS for web, Rust (and Go) for systems, and Python for ML, it doesn't have a use case anymore that can drive a community or any hope for growth in the future. so a "niche DSL" for legacy webapps and plugin systems is what's left IMO, but i'm sorry for being super frank about it languages like this with a shrinking community and loose security policies pose around the centralized package management system pose high security risks to its users.
      - nightpool 1y ago
        I'm not saying that they're just "a nice community member", I'm saying that they're the ones doing the work. They're not randos, they're trusted maintainers in the ecosystem with a proven track record. After the purge, rubygems and Bundler has only one active maintainer, one who's splitting his time between Rails, Ruby core, and many other open source projects. The bundler and gem-specific experts have been removed, and we've gone from a bus factor of 4-5 to a bus factor of 1. This is much, much more unacceptable then the theoretical risk of a trusted, active maintainer with 10+ years of community experience suddenly deciding to go rogue and rewrite history (has this ever happened in the history of a supply chain attack?) Also, commit access to Github doesn't even say anything about access to deploying the actual package on rubygems. If security really was the goal, there were a million less invasive ways to make this change then revoking commit access from the active maintainers. Set up branch protections, require approvals, etc. There are a lot more tools in the toolbox other than "remove all of the maintainers".
- corytheboyd 1y ago
  Honestly I don’t know how to feel about it anymore, but I found the rhetoric way too explosive at the time, when nothing was really known. Now that some time has passed, and more has been said… yeah I get your point too. Ruby has been a HUGE part of building my career, I don’t want to see it slide away one questionable move at a time into full corporate control. It’s not TOO hard to see how this whole thing could just be step one of that :/
  - phatskat 1y ago
    I hate this for the community - I’m an outsider, who always wanted to give Ruby (and Rails) a good swing. However, after this, and after learning about dhh’s awful (imo) stances, I’m not ever going to go near any of it. I had a similar “yuck” when WPEngine started taking Mullenweg to task over all of the WordPress shenanigans - that hit a lot closer to home for me, as I’ve spent about half of my career building great sites and applications on top of Wordpress. Although I’ve moved on, I was still an active contributor on the WP StackExchange and had my ear to the ground in several plugin repos I authored for employers who contributed to Five for the Future, and replied to comments on blog posts from people who found my previous insights helpful. I have zero interest to ever go back to that project because of how poorly it’s been managed - if you want to see one man completely wreck an open-source ecosystem, it’s quite a fascinating if not depressing story.

nightpool 1y ago

So Ruby Central, by their own admission, agreed to take $$$$$ of funding on the premise that they would "secure RubyGems against supply chain attacks", and then sat on their hands not doing anything about it until a few days before the deadline, when it was too late to seek community consensus or figure out a good transition plan. So they ended up screwing over everybody who was actually doing work on the project in favor of their own funding. And also they apparently used this as an opportunity to consolidate their power in other ways (renaming the github org) for reasons that were unrelated to the self-imposed deadline. How does this make them look better?

actionfromafar 1y ago
To my untrained eye it looks like a board with a bunch of money and perhaps a fork on their hands.
- phatskat 1y ago
  This definitely has a Mullenweg-esque scent to it.

pmontra 1y ago

> [The Ruby Central board] is a small group of volunteers is somewhat at odds with > Some [...] companies specifically pay Ruby Central to ensure the security and stability of that part of the supply chain, but not so much. Then the sentence goes on with > but then discovered that people with no active affiliation or agreement in place had top level privileges to some of this critical infrastructure. So something has been wrongly managed or wrongly sold. Then the final part about the emotional conversations and the dilemma sounds honest or at least very plausible, but as they write, the critical mistake already happened.

brianm 1y ago
Not really -- non-profit boards are usually volunteers, even ion the non-profit has revenue used for operations.

kg 1y ago

> I can't speak for the board or the Ruby Central staff. But I know them and they are like me. They do this because they love Ruby and our community. I'm certain of that. I don't know how to reconcile 'they love Ruby and our community' with moves that are actively hostile to the community.

hatthew 1y ago
> [do what we did], or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going Seems pretty clear-cut to me.

eutropia 1y ago

I think that if they had been up front and transparent, and cut the PR bullshit corpospeak from their damage-control post, this would have been something that's much less embarrassing for all involved. Something like: "Hey all, RC here: with the very real threat of supply-chain attacks looming around us, one of the critical financial backers of our nonprofit org gave us a deadline around tightening access to the Github Account for rubygems/bundler. We tried and failed to arrive at a consensus with the open-source volunteers and maintainers for the best path forward and were forced to make a decision between losing the funding and taking decisive (if ham-fisted) action to keep Ruby Central financially healthy. We think RC's continued work is important enough that we stand by our decision, upsetting though it might be, but want to work out a better one ASAP. We are genuinely sorry for any fear/disruption this has caused." Something simple that just owns the fact that they screwed up and tried to handle it as best they could. Doing this proactively as soon as they made the changes and broadcasting it would have been even better, but even posting this in reply to the controversy would have done more imo...

adriand 1y ago
Sounds like you should volunteer for Ruby Central to help them with their communications! I don't mean that facetiously: it seems that they could use you, or someone like you, with comms. As the OP readily admits, this is not a strong point for them. My general take on this: 1) Nerds are often not the best at communicating. 2) People on the Internet can be very cruel towards people they don't know. We could all do better, especially with #2. The Internet used to be cool as hell. Now, by and large, it sucks.
- gsinclair 1y ago
  The organisation already has non-technical people employed. They should be able to get basic communications right.
nenenejej 1y ago
This has the advantage of being short and so take way less brainpower to piece what actually happened. Reading between lines is exhausting.

baggy_trough 1y ago

Locking out a guy like David Rodriguez (the main person I see doing bundler commits) in a dramatic fashion just seems like absolute craziness. I can't fathom doing it without a very good reason, which has yet to be revealed if it exists.

padjo 1y ago
Does “lest we lose critical funding because we don’t have proper agreements with our committers” not cut it as a reason for you? Genuinely curious, it seems like a reasonable explanation assuming it’s true.
- generalk 1y ago
  It does not, for me. Given that access was cut, then restored, then cut again, then days, then someone finally says "hey were were going to lose critical funding" makes it seem like a post-facto excuse for a hostile takeover. And the whole "oh, well, we're bad at comms" makes it sound even worse! Which is the whole crux of the issue. At no point in any of this did Ruby Central do anything reasonable. The they tried to explain that their unreasonable actions were reasonable, if you only knew the things they knew, which they were for some reason unable to tell people until just now. Could it be true? Sure, absolutely. Does it seem reasonable at the moment? Hell no.
  - lloeki 1y ago
    From TFA: > Let's get some kind of committer agreement in place with those folks who need access (the same way many other high profile open source projects have), and remove access from those who don't, while still being fully open to accepting PRs and being open to re-welcoming them as committers if they decide that is how they want to spend their time in the future. > Here's the challenge. How do you tell someone that has had commit and admin access to critical infrastructure long after that need has expired that you need to revoke that access without upsetting them? deivid-rodriguez's last commits were Sept 18: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits/master/?since=2025-09-18&until=2025-09-22 https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits/master/?since=2... With 7873 commits since 2018 he's 2x over the second one and crushingly the most active contributor since then: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/graphs/contributors https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/graphs/contributors However you slice it, none of that fits into TFA's above narrative. His access being revoked can only be described as complete bonkers.

qrush 1y ago

I'm truly hoping for a reasonable resolution on all sides for this situation. IMO Ruby is too small, and shrinking compared to Python and JS/TS especially in the AI era, to be able to afford any splintering of efforts.

rubiest2010 1y ago
Agreed. I wish the communications would move away from FUD that could scare people away from using Ruby when things are already splintered. A more honest and transparent accounting of what really happened is necessary.
bradly 1y ago
I still remember your The Legal Stuff post on Google Groups from a million years ago. <3

throwaway346434 1y ago

It's such a weird thought process to have gone through, to write this. The sentiments expressed are basically: "I WANT to apologize ... that I feel awful." "How can you possibly talk to someone about changing access, when multiple people tell you no, you are wrong?! A coup is the only way!" "Because funding deadline, we executed a coup, which will keep everyone safe from hostile actors... Taking over accounts and access"

delichon 1y ago
> Ruby Central has been responsible for RubyGems and Bundler for a long time. This isn't a new development, and I'm honestly very confused about the confusion. That's the opposite claim from a coup. It's not fair for you to put those words in his mouth.
- throwaway346434 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - delichon 1y ago
    He is claiming that Ruby Central has the authority. True or not, that claim is not consistent with a coup. You seem to be catastrophizing and constructing misleading quotes, including inverting his words, not because his claim is not true but because of how he communicated it and the impact of it.
    - throwaway346434 1y ago
      My point is that he chose to communicate the way he did; it is poorly thought out and extremely difficult to accept as an explanation. Objective tests you yourself can perform. 1) How much of the publication talks about himself? Why is that relevant? 2) How much does it directly provide links, context, history? Can you find the opposing point of view directly linked from it, or is it omitted? 3) From reading the content, does this person represent the board, or not? Do they make any conflicting claims that are difficult to both be true at the same time? 4) A coup d'etat is a "a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government" Were the people who lost access acting as a governing body? Was the loss of access sudden and unexpected? Did the loss of access follow any of the rules of the governing group? Did the loss of access harm individuals? With the answers to the above, reflect on the following: Why would someone write about themselves, their experience, etc for 6 paragraphs? Would you say it is clear they have only been appointed since Jan 2025? Or are they trying to establish themselves as an authority? If they are not attempting to appeal to authority, why is it relevant? Did they actually apologise? If so, to who? Is it specific? Does it clearly articulate what the person did, admit fault, recognise harm? Or is there downplaying of impact, vague language, downplaying of involvement? Does it characterise the contrary point of view in a way that trivial uses the concerns? Are the conversations "emotional" or is it implied the people experiencing the negative act are? Is the author emotional? If you were the person or people affected, would you accept this explanation? If you were the person taking these actions, would you explain why like this? Why or why not? I strongly encourage you to do this exercise, putting aside feelings or initial responses even if you think I am wrong.

sc68cal 1y ago

This story is missing any context around what occurred. The only thing I was able to find was by searching, and I came to this PDF statement. https://pup-e.com/goodbye-rubygems.pdf https://pup-e.com/goodbye-rubygems.pdf > On September 9th, with no warning or communication, a RubyGems maintainer unilaterally: > renamed the “RubyGems” GitHub enterprise to “Ruby Central”, > added non-maintainer Marty Haught of Ruby Central, and > removed every other maintainer of the RubyGems project. > On September 18th, with no explanation, Marty Haught revoked GitHub organization membership for all admins on the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org maintainer teams Which is important context that was left out of this board member's statement.

jtbayly 1y ago
It was not left out of the statement. I understood that was essentially what happened by the time I got to the end of his piece. The only exception being the “with no warning or communication” part. Obviously there is disagreement about whether that is true or not.
caymanjim 1y ago
Everything you're quoting is from one aggrieved person, who clearly felt slighted, and who left out a whole lot of context in their own post. The article above is a lot more reasoned, less emotional, and seems completely reasonable to me. Ruby Central clearly has issues with both internal and external communication. And the above article isn't an official statement either; it's just one person, not involve in the decision, offering another perspective.
- throwaway346434 1y ago
  It's not just one person. Between the initial removal of access, then giving it back after explaining it was a mistake; the people involved started a conversation about governance to clarify/fix things. https://github.com/rubygems/rfcs/pull/61 https://github.com/rubygems/rfcs/pull/61 The conversation terminated because the majority of those people then had their access revoked again. When weighing the facts here; which group or claimant has the most evidence for their claims? The technical folks with lots of commits over many years, or the treasurer of an organisation who says the impetus for this was a "funding deadline" so all access had to be seized?

kragen 1y ago

I don't know more about the controversy than what's explained here, but, reading between the lines, it sounds like companies want Ruby Central to operate more like a for-profit company, where people carry out defined tasks in exchange for getting paid, than like a jury or the American Medical Association, where people do what seems best to them in exchange for a harder-to-define sense of collective social obligation. (When they work, of course; sometimes those institutions don't work very well.) I am skeptical that the model where people carry out defined tasks in exchange for getting paid can properly discharge the obligations of trustworthiness and disinterest that are necessary for the proper functioning of software supply chains. I'm thinking that probably people whose motivation is primarily personal gain will seek out ways to exploit their users' trust for additional personal gain, for example by bundling adware and other malware into their software the way Microsoft does with Windows, or only releasing security updates to paying customers. Open-source licensing provides some protection against this problem, because it guarantees you the legal right to switch to a non-malicious fork; but the whole reason we're talking about open-source supply chain security in the first place is that your vulnerability to your chosen upstream is still far from nonzero.

hluska 1y ago
> reading between the lines, it sounds like companies want Ruby Central to operate more like a for-profit company, where people carry out defined tasks in exchange for getting paid, than like a jury or the American Medical Association, where people do what seems best to them in exchange for a harder-to-define sense of collective social obligation. There was a funding agreement which imposed obligations upon the operators. Those obligations were to be sure that supply chain attacks were reasonably secured against. The volunteers didn’t have to sign that agreement - they chose to and received consideration for their decision to sign. Licensing terms don’t change the underlying mechanism of a contract and the message is even easier. If your organization cannot abide by the terms of a contract, don’t sign it.

andersmurphy 1y ago

> Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going. Seems pretty clear after reading this. If 1-2 companies pulling funding is enough for them to force you to to what they want, its hard to stay independent.

decasia 1y ago

Agreeing with most of the other comments here that this discussion needs more context which we don't have... If the request for additional access controls/access cleanup came from one of the Ruby Central funders, could we not know who that was and what exactly their ask consisted of? I am interested in knowing their side of the story, and what the motivation was. (But in general, cutting off long-time maintainers' access seems like a bad choice - as presumably they have long since proven their good will toward the ruby community as shepherds of these projects.)

reenorap 1y ago

The only reason why Ruby and other open source projects survive is because large companies can trust them to do the right thing. Given the critical nature of the supply chain attacks, what the board did was 100% right. Like he said, some people's egos got hurt but if no one can trust the maintainers, then Ruby has no future in the industry and it will die quickly. This is basically like fixing technical debt. It's painful and it's political but sometimes you have to do the right thing for the community as opposed to trying to assuage individuals' egos.

blibble 1y ago
was it even their project? just because they host it doesn't mean it's theirs my webhost doesn't own the community around my projects simply because it's on their server
khamidou 1y ago
I think you got things mixed up, open source projects survive because volunteers believe in them and want to contribute to them. Large companies rarely get involved, occasionally with some funding. It sounds like they sold something to their donors they couldn't really guarantee – supply chain safety – and they decided to alienate their contributors to try to appease them. Only time will tell if this was really damaging to the ruby community or just a temporary hurdle
- dewey 1y ago
  Look at the core maintainers of Rails for example. Many are paid by Shopify and Basecamp, so it’s much more commercial than your regular open source project. Which isn’t a bad thing that people get to contribute on company time.
  - khamidou 1y ago
    Again this is mixed causality. Rails did not take off because of commercial interests – besides dhh who was working on it on the side, all the initial committers were doing that for fun. Eventually they brought rails in many commercial companies and these companies succeeded to the point they could pay people to maintain rails.

nyeah 1y ago

[flagged]

phatskat 1y ago
I think a lot of people did read the OP and were left wanting - I know I did and was. Breaking down the posted article, there’s a lot missing (which the author admits), and it’s not clear really what the goal of the post was other than to say “someone, not me, made an oops. But it’s fine, right, because the community needed this to happen.” Parts that were particularly odd, that others have said with better words: - Who imposed this ultimatum on RC? - How long was the timeline to “tighten things up”? It sounds like there was both a decent amount of time and an immediate urgency - it can’t be both. - “We’re nerds who can’t communicate well” (paraphrased) is such a poor argument - I get it, I’ve had to do a lot of work to figure out how to navigate social spaces and how to communicate effectively in professional settings. That said, the author is writing as if they’ve never had a single conversation with a technical person that they didn’t know well; that any conversation about removing or reducing access would be a catastrophe. That’s ridiculous. It seems that either there was poor planning around this, or someone forgot about the deadline and YOLO’d it, or there was a malicious push to oust some of the biggest contributors under the guise of security. One thing is clear, regardless of what the root cause of this all was: RC showed a deep lack of respect for the people that make their community what it is, and that stinks.

akk0 1y ago

So basically they're a bunch of serfs

vintagedave 1y ago

> A deadline (which as far as I understand, we agreed to) loomed. Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going. This makes a lot of sense, and it puts the 'drastic' action in understandable light. It also contrasts with the 'On September 9th, with no warning or communication, a RubyGems maintainer unilaterally...' from the Goodbye RubyGems letter. Perhaps that person did not have communications or insight? Going forward I think we could judge the good faith, if it's uncertain, by if we do see people reinstated. Cutting off access (for urgency with a deadline) followed by reinstatement (because they contribute) would match this post. No doubt there will be hurt feelings on all sides, which is understandable, but I hope as humans everyone can get through it.

cyanydeez 1y ago
Pretty sure github issues would enligghten everyone on the timely communication of funding requirements

hyperpape 1y ago

A lot of people are arguing about whether locking down access was justified to resolve the security issues. I guess it's debatable. But I don't see any excuse for not putting out a statement when you do it. You have to know there will be a fight, and you will look like the bad guy. Perhaps I could see directly communicating to the maintainers that you expect that they'll be reinstated. But to say nothing? To let the post by duckinator float around for days without having a "we did this because of security concerns, we want to work together and find a resolution..." It's incomprehensible that they thought this would go well.

nenenejej 1y ago
I mean imagine you are at work and you need to so this for SOC2 or something but dont tell your colleagues.
- danielheath 1y ago
  Firstly, you can tell them you’re working on SOC2 compliance, and secondly, those colleagues are getting paid in dollars, not doing it for the love of the work.
  - nenenejej 1y ago
    > Firstly, you can tell them you’re working on SOC2 compliance Bingo

mpalmer 1y ago

For any company that wants to secure and maintain critical source infrastructure for a language, community/maintainer relations is a fundamental responsibility. It is not to be waved away with quasi-candid admissions that you're just too small a team, too technical, etc. Even if this board member is being totally sincere about his feelings for Ruby and its community, it changes little. > Some of those companies specifically pay Ruby Central to ensure the security and stability of that part of the supply chain, but then discovered that people with no active affiliation or agreement in place had top level privileges to some of this critical infrastructure. This is the most candid bit of the article. RubyCentral seems to have screwed up. The sense I get after reading this paragraph is that RC's non-apologies about poor communication are smoke. Why did they have to move this quickly/silently? Well... If you are taking money from businesses in exchange for certain assurances about the security/soundness of RubyGems, you have a responsibility the minute pen leaves paper to KYC(ontributors). Not when there's suddenly a fire, or when your clients notice. By all appearances, RC was negligent, if not necessarily in the legal sense. They were highly reactive in response to a problem they should have been across already, and they have paid for it with a chunk of the Ruby community's trust. To now retcon this action as poorly-communicated but ultimately noble and security-minded does not sit very well.

rubiest2010 1y ago

This is a reasonable perspective but leaves a lot of unanswered questions and creates more questions. Who is the funder threatening to pull funding and why were they not more collaborative or flexible with Ruby Central? Did they know that this is how their request would be handled? How much information and what information did Board members have when making their votes? One thing that hasn’t been addressed is who was responsible for communications and implementation of this. It says here that the Director of Open Source did what the Board asked of him. Outside of the Board, which as stated here were heads down and trying to problem solve, Ruby Central’s website also shows a staff of several non-technical employees. Prominently, there is an Executive Director with a background in communications and non profit work per their LinkedIn. Where was this Executive Director and the other staff members during this? Were they involved with decision making and communication around this? How involved was the Board of Directors in implementation after the decision was made? It is a hollow statement to say they are just technical people trying to problem solve when there appears to be a whole team of non-technical staff members and an executive specializing in communications. Something clearly went wrong here and there are a lot of missing pieces around what happened after the vote took place. Most of this could have been mitigated with standard processes and simply communicating to maintainers and the community.

rubiest2010 1y ago
To add, did Ruby Central consider going to the community and asking for funding so they wouldn’t have to be beholden to one or a small group of key funders? If they were at risk of shutting down without this funding source I think the community might have rallied around them so they could make more independent decisions in the best interests of the community. This is not to say that they didn’t act in the best interests of the community by tightening security, but an organization of this nature should be able to act more independently.
- hluska 1y ago
  This program is public and has been for a very long time - it’s called the Community Support Program because Windows devs don’t have enough nightmares of the acronym CSP. Do you contribute? I can send you a link if you don’t.

anyonecancode 1y ago

What I'm missing is what, if any, communication Ruby Central had with maintainers. > How do you tell someone that has had commit and admin access to critical infrastructure long after that need has expired that you need to revoke that access without upsetting them? Start by letting go of the goal of not upsetting them. Make sure you do communicate clearly. Just say what you said a paragraph earlier: open source ecosystems, including ours, are increasingly suffering supply chain attacks. To guard against this, we need to tighten access that has traditionally been fairly loose. Starting <date>, we're going to remove general access and ask that contributors sign <link to agreement> before re-enabling access. I mean, maybe that is what happened -- as the OP says, he wasn't part of the conversations so can't say. From the earlier public posts, it doesn't _sound_ like that's what happened. But I'd say as a general rule, it's important to communicate disruptive changes ahead of time to those affected and give a clear path to how they can mitigate the disruption.

nenenejej 1y ago

I hate the style of write up. It feels a bit gaslightly (it may or may not be but feels like it). And defensive. Just drop all the facts. Acknowledge you fucked up. Or dont say anything at all? A board position means responsibility not just "head down coding". And that means communicating with people. For clarity I wasnt super keen on the original submission this is responding to, for similar reasons.

thomascountz 1y ago

I think that most Rubyists want to forgive each other and move forward. The board, staff, and volunteers at Ruby Central are all people and people are fallible, that's fine. The way to receive forgiveness isn't to convince others (who weren't there and who don't have the full context) that what was done was reasonable or justified. It doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter who is at fault. What matters is who will take responsibility. The actions taken by people in service of Ruby Central have had unintended consequences, including damaging the community's trust in Ruby Central's stewardship. A new governance model will solve only the problem of there not being a governance model. There also has to be an acknowledgment that the lack of an existing appropriate governance model wasn't just a "fiduciary failure," but a failure which cased harm to the community and contributors. Contributors who—like the board—are volunteers, and would have probably liked to have their significant dedication shown more respect. You show respect to someone by giving them important information from which they can use to make their own decisions. As opposed to withholding information because you are uncomfortable with the possibility that they may make a decision you don't want them to.

mikeg8 1y ago
Best comment I’ve seen on this thread so far.

skywhopper 1y ago

Honestly this description makes me even more concerned. There’s a lot of “I don’t know what happened” and “I wasn’t involved” and “apparently we agreed to”. In particular, after a long winded introduction and setting of the scene, suddenly there’s a mention out of the blue of a 24 hour deadline to cut off access or face losing funding (forever)? But who was holding this deadline over the board’s head is not explained (in fact the author doesn’t seem to know???). Overall this just reinforces the impression that the RC board handled this sloppily and in a rushed manner, and failed to communicate with long term community members, and thought of themselves as the only parties who mattered, while not taking responsibility for holding such an important position (see the opening paragraphs about how “we don’t have time to communicate to the public because we’re busy programmers without a PR team”).

lightbritefight 1y ago
The poster is the treasurer too. How can he not know where the money is coming from and what constraints its beholden to? Wildly unprofessional or just willful lying.

Mystery-Machine 1y ago

Here's a little bit of nitpicking: > I want to apologize, genuinely, to people who have felt (...) outrage (...) after reading some of what others have shared. He's apologizing for what others have shared, not for what they (Ruby Central) did. > I often go out of my way to avoid making people feel bad "I'm the good guy." > and so to be part of what's caused so much chaos lately has really been awful. "_I_ feel awful." "I'm sorry for what others have said about what we _did_. I feel awful for people being outraged" Amazing. > this is a small group of volunteers spread out all over the globe. (...) It's just us. You didn't, for a single moment, think about notifying the people involved that you are removing them? It's the very first thing to do - notify someone who's involved of the change in their status. If your communication skills didn't reach a level in which you thought that would be the thing to do, I don't know what to tell you. > It is really boring stuff. So why do I do it? So what? Should we feel sorry for you? > I love the community. I love the people who use Ruby, (...) I love the people who give their time to Ruby and I love the people and companies who generously provide financial support for Ruby. Cool. > I can't speak for the board or the Ruby Central staff. But (...) proceeds to speak for the board and the Ruby Central staff. > Ruby Central has been responsible for RubyGems and Bundler for a long time. This is a lie. RubyGems and Bundler have been maintained by a group of core maintainers. Some members of this group were also Ruby Central staff, but not all. > It's not a new story that Ruby Central has been working on (or trying to at least) improve the governance model for Bundler and RubyGems. It's a new story to me. If it's not a new story, do you mind sharing some links to past discussions? > How do you tell someone that has had commit and admin access to critical infrastructure long after that need has expired that you need to revoke that access without upsetting them? You learn some basic English. And then let them know. It's called communication. > And what if other people who do still need that access claim things like "If you remove their access, I'll just add it back" or "If you remove their access, I'll quit". It's called consensus. And communication. You talk. You speak with people. And then you agree on a decision. > These are emotional conversations. Yes, they are. Is that why we shouldn't have them? When you want to leave your wife, do you just leave? What a strong person with strong values. > I wasn't a part of them and can't actually speak to the content of the conversations or how they were handled. Bad. They were handled bad. Why did you write this post? You don't have information, you don't know what happened...you just love people and community and companies. Happy happy joy joy. > we don't have a "communications team" You don't need a communications team. You just need to have a communication channel public or private, where you can reach all of the core members. It could be an email with everyone in CC. > A deadline (which as far as I understand, we agreed to) loomed. If you're not sure whether it was agreed on, again, communication. Learn how to communicate. Which deadline? Who set this deadline? > With less than 24 hours to go Did someone give you 24 hours deadline? Why wasn't this discussed long before the deadline? > Marty, Ruby Central's Director of Open Source How the f is Marty? If he wasn't one of RubyGems maintainers, why is he suddenly being put as the main maintainer? Aside from communication issues, you also have decision making issues. All of the core members should come to an agreement, without Marty. > I love this community and I love Ruby. Cool. Please find some time to read a book or two on communication skills. As well as decision making. Read the comments in this thread. Ignore mine, don't think too much about it. Just read other comments. Then think again about your decision and to which percentage people in this thread agree with it. And perhaps reevaluate it.

cratermoon 1y ago

Money. It's all about money. This is the only sentence from the post worth reading: "Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going"

mikemcquaid 1y ago

I’m the Homebrew Project leader and care a lot about Ruby so met with both sides to attempt to mediate and posted two threads on Bluesky about what went down: https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lz7klsyue22f https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lz7klsyue22f https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lzfxctubbk2y https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lzfxctubbk2y TL;DR: Regardless of what you think of RubyCentral’s actions, it’s very clear they absolutely screwed up the execution and communication here. In general the transparency is far below what you’d expect from an open source organisation.

renewiltord 1y ago

Christ what a clusterfuck. I only use Ruby because of Rails so whatever DHH says I'll go with. If he says this is bogus it's bogus, otherwise it's not bogus.

SuperNinKenDo 1y ago

Tl;dr: corporate coup.

gregorymichael 1y ago

This seems super reasonable.