[lavela]

Welp, so there goes another ecosystem I considered exploring.

What almost surprises me the most, is that such a mature ecosystem still doesn't have a formalized governance structure after all this time. How common is this among large and widely-used open source projects?

[teknofobi]

Problem with package managers are they are quite expensive to run, so hard to manage in an otherwise open source ecosystem. There was some controversy around NPM before the GitHub acquisition https://www.businessinsider.com/npm-cofounder-laurie-voss-re..., which I guess is the exact problem a non-profit such as RubyCentral tried to solve.

I would GitHub would be quite well-positioned to set up infrastructure around a fork of RubyGems if things fall apart.

[lavela]

I don't understand yet how that relates to formalizing your decision structures as a group.

I'm sure NPM as a company has some form of decision hierarchy and RubyCentral does as well, but it seems like Ruby Gems doesn't (or didn't). I learned the hard way that writing this down is one of the first thing you should do in any kind of group formation process.

I get that organically grown tech projects don't have that from the start (and that they might not immediately recognize that they're a group at all), but I'd reckoned that an organization of the size of Ruby Gems, with such an importance, would have taken care of that a while ago and I think it's quite irresponsible that they didn't.