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by rich_kilmer 249 days ago
As a co-author of RubyGems and one of the original Board members of Ruby Central, they are not a hostile entity. They are the entity that we gave stewardship of RubyGems and we/they have hosted it for its entire existence.
2 comments

I disagree. The actions are orthogonal to your claim - they eliminated everyone else from there. How is that not hostile? Duckinator has been 100% right here.

> we gave stewardship of RubyGems

I didn't sign anything.

I also remember the original creators of rubygems. How old is Ruby Central? 10 years? 15 years? There were several years before that.

Ruby Central started in 2001. I was one of the early Board members, along with Chad Fowler and David Alan Black. We put on every Ruby conference until Ruby became more popular to support multiple conferences. We started coding RubyGems (although the name originated in 2001 at the first RubyConf in Florida) in 2003 at the RubyConf in Austin TX. We sat around a table the first night with a CVS repo on a USB drive and passed it around and committed code until we had a functioning gem command. I demoed it in my talk the next day with the first "gem install". Gem versioning, gemspec, gem command, gem server were all built that first night. Obviously tons of changes since then!
It goes without saying that Ruby Central doesn't think Ruby Central has ever lost any trust to begin with.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but the discussion is about the phrase "hostile entity", not about a loss of trust.
That really doesn't matter. I think what happened could be described as "hostility" towards the community, that's what my impression was, it was appearing like a hostile takeover of the github repositories/organization with no discussion, no community involvement, no transparency. Obviously not everybody will agree especially not people working at Ruby Central.