[runjake]

Context: Justin Searls is a “high profile” person in the Ruby and Rails community. He has a reputation for being a nice person and behaving in good faith.

From a personal standpoint, I can easily take his words at face value. I’m also curious about the views of Aaron “tenderlove” Patterson, who has a similar reputation.

Now that Justin has spoken out, maybe Aaron will take the opportunity to. Both tend to stay out of drama.

[davidcelis]

Some additional context is that Justin Searls is close friends with people who are or have been on Rails Core and/or at Shopify. I've long been a fan of Justin's work, and I've spent time with him at conferences so I can attest to him being a nice person in my experience… But, given the alleged parties at play here, it's hard to take this piece as unbiased when it lacks that disclosure

[hitekker]

It's an opinion piece by a trusted member of the community. He doesn't need to act unbiased but be credible and informative. As he wrote in his disclosure:

> People whose livelihood depends on the health of the Ruby ecosystem deserve more information than they're getting, especially now that its operational stability has come under threat.

On this count, Searls' article has done the work. I didn't know that Andre Arko baselessly threatened Google with lawyers, or that Andre played fast-and-loose with people's donations. That information was excluded from "unbiased" analyses and fact-checks which seem to largely target Andre's enemies.

[wgjordan]

The problem is not that Searls has opinions, it's that this petty hit piece against Andre was heavily wrapped in neutral, 'all I can do is offer a little bit of context', 'I'm not rushing to take sides' framing language, resulting in a disingenuous, passive-aggressive tone.

Why is Justin dredging up that one time eight years ago when Andre mistakenly called out a repo for infringing upon his employer's work (for which he publicly apologized five hours later)? Why is he harping on anecdotes from nine years ago in order to suggest Andre may have allegedly (gasp) expensed technology purchases and business meals to his employer? What does this all have to do with the current situation, other than unnecessarily stir the pot with a laundry list of old petty grievances fed to him by a bunch of anonymous contacts ('a lot of different people told me a lot of concerning stories')?

I think the author's close ties to Rails Core / Shopify employees is extremely important context for this post, especially since it's context that's been intentionally hidden by a neutral, unbiased framing.

[tumdum_]

Aaron is employed by Shopify. Also I *think* he was part of the shopify team that took over some responsibilities and/or on-call, see here for the sudden commits after a very long break: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits/master/?author=...

[throwawayruby]

In open source software, it is what is whispered behind closed doors that often matters most. The whispers in this dispute concern André. His behaviour, many quietly say, is the principal cause of the dispute with RubyCentral. His practical contributions over the past year have been scant, yet other maintainers suggest that if he were removed from the GitHub organisation’s ownership, they would simply reappoint him.

Few dare state as much in public, hence the anonymity. The reason is straightforward: André has previously threatened legal action, and appears to be pursuing it once again. RubyCentral, for its part, has bungled the handling of the matter. But André has managed — with the exception of this one post — to cast himself not as a long-time beneficiary of his open source work, drawing maximum financial gain from it, but rather as an aggrieved victim of institutional mismanagement.

[bgentry]

Aaron did RT the post here which likely indicates some agreement with the sentiment in it: https://x.com/searls/status/1972293469193351558

Also he shared it directly while saying it was good here: https://x.com/tenderlove/status/1972370330892321197

[sevenseacat]

Aaron has shared this same article, on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/tenderlove.dev/post/3lzw5byy7xc24