So, after the seeming hostile takeover of RubyGems, I this week saw this announcement:'nhttps://gem.coop/'nOf a reboot of RubyGems by its own former maintainers, governance structure to be announced tomorrow.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

So, after the seeming hostile takeover of RubyGems, I this week saw this announcement:

https://gem.coop/

Of a reboot of RubyGems by its own former maintainers, governance structure to be announced tomorrow. Can people who are plugged into the Ruby community give me a sense of how significant an event this is? Does it have a chance to displace RubyCentral?

[mcc@mastodon.social]

RubyCentral do seem to have, in their coup, successfully claimed the "instutitions" of Ruby in the sense of domain names and github repos. But the community, and (a lot?) (most of?) the authors of the source in those github repos do not seem to be on board:

https://andre.arko.net/2025/09/25/bundler-belongs-to-the-ruby-community/

So this seems like a really key test case, whether open source is made of living communities or just an opaque content pipeline for corporate actors to plug their build systems into

[listrophy@ruby.social]

@mcc having met both, if you were to ask me who I trusted more, André or DHH, I would—after catching my breath from rolling on the floor laughing—say “André. Of course it’s André” in between gasps

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@listrophy What, exactly, is the relationship between RubyCentral and DHH? If anything? People often talk about them together, and I can see how DHH fits into the spat between RubyCentral and the community, but I do not find any actual formal relationship between the two.

[mark@mastodon.fixermark.com]

@mcc @listrophy There's an explainer for this because it got weird. Let me see if I can find it.

https://dev.to/cseeman/what-just-happened-to-rubygems-31n9

It's the kind of convoluted tale of woe I seem to only see in the Ruby community (god bless 'em).

• Ruby Central let DHH speak in 2025 RailsConf
• Sidekiq, in response, pulled $250k a year funding
• Shopify saw an opportunity and executed a backfill-the-funding based takeover of RubyGems (the gem-hosting service). This was a carrot-or-stick takeover: they threatened to pull their funding too unless Ruby Central let them increase their ownership stake in the service.

All of this corporate nonsense has people (understandably) backing towards the exits on trusting RubyGems as an independent service that will continue to serve the package needs of the users of Ruby. DHH's relevance to it is that the polarizing nature of his presence in the larger community arranged the circumstances that allowed for the corporate hog-wrasslin' match.

It's all very cyberpunk TBH.

[paddy@mastodon.cloud]

@mcc @listrophy my understanding (cursory) is that DHH is on the board of Shopify, who are the largest funders of Ruby Central by not a small margin.

I think there's speculation that Ruby Central pulled what they pulled because of pressure from Shopify, and then further speculation that DHH was involved in Shopify deciding to exert that pressure.

ETA: sorry, someone more qualified responded while I was typing this 😞