Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wallmountedtv 249 days ago
In short, a hostile takeover forced by Shopify through Ruby Central.

It was sparked after Ruby Central chose to platform an extremist figure prominently for their last RailsConf against the wishes of the sponsors, losing them a lot of sponsorship money, as well as community support.

https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/

3 comments

Might be worth noting the figure in question is the creator of Ruby on Rails.
> a hostile takeover forced by Shopify through Ruby Central.

That's entirely unsubstantiated.

I heard it directly from people directly involved.
So it is unsubstantiated.
This is a little glib, you dropped "Entirely" because you know multiple first hand accounts are actually worth something. If you want to argue the credibility of those accounts, then please be specific about it.
I dropped the entirely because I am on mobile.

We don’t have multiple first hand accounts. All we have is second hand account being relayed by someone with a massive axe to grind against Shopify.

There are a lot of truly committed Rubyists at Shopify, particularly the one handling the relationship with Ruby Central.

The idea that Shopify had done what Joel aledges without a single one of the involved parties on the Shopify side blowing the whistle is preposterous.

So you critisize Joel because he worked at Shopify. He pointed that out when he wrote the article.

Let's add here that YOU also worked at Shopify, until recently.

IF we are going to be critical, then let's be complete here.

I actually think there is a lot of validity to the statement made that Shopify is NOT a neutral party here. We can dispute how much Shopify was involved, but to assume "all is unsubstantiated" while not even disclosing one's own work at Shopify, feels super-strange here.

> It was sparked after Ruby Central chose to platform an extremist figure prominently for their last RailsConf

This is so incredibly one-sided that it misleads more than it informs.

The person they are talking about is DHH. Inviting the creator of Rails to speak at RailsConf – a conference for Rails – is not the outlandish behaviour this comment makes it sound like.

Agreed. There is a lot of conflation of statements that are not directly connected.

The whole DHH argument, for instance, as well as some people having a vendetta about him, is not, or not directly, related to the hostile take-over of rubygems.org. There is a slight partial overlap, but it is a separate discussion (even if DHH was involved with the take-over via Shopify because he does not like Arko or Shopify wanting more power-control to bully the independent developers at rubygems.org with more corporate rules and restrictions; and, by the way, DHH never mentions Arko's name, but even this is a separate discussion still. For instance I specifically do not care about rails nor DHH really, but the hostile take-over was a complete no-go. Ruby Central really pissed off too many people here and unfortunately there are still many open questions that ruby-core has to think about. I am not necessarily saying all came with malicious intent, because I think there is an english language barrier too in regards to Hiroshi Shibata, but even then it may be better to have someone with better knowledge about the english language in charge of gems; there seems to be some strange disconnect or translation going on between english, into japanese and japanese culture, and it is super-confusing.)