Here’s my attempt to explain the situation in a brief way. DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, wrote some things which are considered racist by some people. This caused a prominent Ruby programmer to withdraw his large sponsorship of Ruby Central, a non-profit which organises Ruby conferences, because DHH spoke at one of their conferences. Therefore Ruby Central ended up very dependent on Shopify, a large company, for funding. One theory (mentioned in the article) is that Shopify (where DHH is a board member) then pressured Ruby Central to perform a “hostile takeover” of the RubyGems GitHub organisation, where they revoked the maintainer privileges of long-time contributors. What is RubyGems? It’s a website which is the de facto standard source for “gems”, which are Ruby packages. I guess this is equivalent to NPM in the Node/JavaScript world.
If you want to know the potentially racist stuff said by DHH, he essentially seemed to be unhappy that London is “no longer full of native Brits”. He says “native Brits” now make up “about a third” of London. So by “native Brits” he seems to mean the White British ethnic group, because they made up 37% of London in the 2021 census.
The Ruby programmer who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: “I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak. We cannot tolerate hateful people as leaders in our communities.”
The “hostile takeover” of RubyGems has led some Ruby programmers to create an alternative to the RubyGems website. This alternative is gem.coop. Also there is an open letter signed by influential Ruby programmers which calls for Ruby on Rails to be forked so that DHH no longer has an association with it.
The article that this post links to is an update to the situation: Ruby Central is now taking steps to try and cool the controversy.
Thoughts on this?
Edit: fixed typo.
I’m not sure it’s worth engaging with the kind of person who uses SJW as a pejorative.
I’m just interested to see what the other side of the argument might be. Sometimes you might very strongly disagree with other people’s views, or even be disgusted by those views, but you might still want to find out what those views are.
Sure, but if they’re using SJW as a pejorative, you already know what their (disgusting) views are. I have yet to meet one of these people who didn’t fall into a rather specific shitty box when it comes to certain viewpoints.
Especially nowadays, long after “SJW” stopped being commonly used. If they’re still holding on to a 2016 anti-SJW “everyone’s so offended!!” mentality, they’re probably not worth engaging with. Just shows they never matured past that point.
Sure, just know that this feedback is coming from people who have probably walked the same path and are trying to save you some pain. Best of luck, but I have found people like that are not engaging in good faith.