: Taps Ruby core to oversee RubyGems, Bundler

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who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: “I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak.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.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    182·
    4 hours ago

    Racists defending racism? Nothing new here.

    The edited quotes from OP are bad enough but they’re even worse in context:

    I thought I might move [to London] one day. That was then. Now, I wouldn’t dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it’s no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

    …

    That frustration was on wide display in Tommy Robinson’s march yesterday. British and English flags flying high and proud, like they would in Copenhagen on the day of a national soccer match. Which was both odd to see but also heartwarming.

    …

    [transphobia]

    …

    I really feel for the Brits because it’s not obvious how they get themselves out of this pickle. They’re still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls.

    GTFO with this scumbag whitewash. Ofc it’s a “moderatecentrist”. Fash troll garbage.

    • BigFig@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      3 hours ago

      DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, wrote some things which are considered racist by some people.

      Yeah fuck of with that “some people” lmao

    • moderatecentrist@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      11·
      4 hours ago

      I’m not a fascist or a troll, and if someone wants to read exactly what DHH wrote, then they can click on the link to his blog post, which is in my summary. I think it’s good that you’re quoting more of it to be honest, so people can see what he wrote, and they can decide for themselves what they think about it. I’m not trying to “whitewash” anything, I just wanted to give people an overview of the situation so they can draw their own conclusions, whether positive or negative.