[saghm]

From the outside, I'd argue that the most neutral way to interpret all of this is to assume good faith and trust every statement that hasn't been explicitly disagreed with by another party. Between what I've read before this blog post and what the author says here, that would lead me to conclude that Andre had years of behaving unprofessionally to Ruby Central and at least on one occasion towards Shopify itself, and then recently when Shopify became the de facto only funding source of Ruby Central, they demanded that Ruby Central take over RubyGems and Bundler, and as part of that, Andre got removed. The lack of communication around it just makes it seem like they had every motivation to try to remove him specifically, and took quite drastic actions to do so, but for unstated reasons chose not to publicize this aspect of it. If this were actually what the stated intentions of the changes were, I might understand it, even if I felt that using financial pressure on a third-party organization to remove someone from a different organization was a bit heavy-handed. Without that, it's hard to feel like this new context changes things much; even if he deserved the outcome personally, making huge changes to infrastructure that a huge community relies on to remove him seems like something worthwhile to be transparent about, and it doesn't do much to raise the level of trust that their stewardship of the infrastructure will be handled responsibly.

My opinion on this might change if the timeline of what happened were challenged in some meaningful way, but allusions to "details that would contradict fact-checks and timelines others have pieced together and published" isn't that. The only way to steel-man an argument that isn't stated is to assume infallibility, and that's just not reasonable to ask people to do.