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who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: “I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak.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

  • Kissaki@feddit.orgEnglish
    11·
    3 hours ago

    For DHH context, I’ll link this open letter

    An open letter to the Rails Core team and Ruby community

    David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) has publicly published writings that make clear he holds racist and transphobic views, as well as a number of other traits undesirable in any figurehead and community leader.

    We, the undersigned, call upon the Rails Core team and the wider Ruby community, to:

    • cut ties with DHH and his work from this point forward
    • hard fork Rails and associated projects to a new name and development free from his influence
    • adopt a modern Code of Conduct with suitable community governance

    It has three source links on ‘racist’, ‘transphobic’, and ‘undesirable’ if you want to form your own opinion.

    Related to DHH, there’s also been controversies on Omarchy/Hyprland recently (post from 8 days ago). That source has a lot more information and historical/personal experience on DHH.

    You might’ve noticed Framework, the laptop manufacturer, embroiled in a controversy as of now. The Discord server is on lockdown because the volunteer moderation team has gone on hiatus, and the Framework forum post about the controversy has been gaining unsightly amounts of steam from people disappointed at actions taken by Framework.