I'm leaving Ruby Central • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#21

Post by bradly » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:48 PM UTC

retrorubies wrote: post #2

I’ve always acted as a community-oriented person, so I feel it’s my duty to share what really happened, what the current state is, and why Ruby Central has failed in the eyes of the community. This is my perspective — and why I’m leaving Ruby Central by choice, but am being forced out of Bundler, RubyGems, and RubyGems.org.

fwiw... rubygems.org was one of the only open source projects I contributed to on a regular basis (albeit once every year or two) and it was always a positive experience. Sorry its gone this way for you and others.

This all reminds me of the feelings after Merb was put down after pressure from Engine Yard so they could guard against their Ruby on Rails hosting business.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#22

Post by IshKebab » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:49 PM UTC

LightBug1 wrote: post #5

dzdt wrote: post #4

This post jumps into the center of some controversy in a very unclear place. Is there a short (preferably neutral) summary of what this is all about somewhere?

See the link in the third paragraph of this fine article.

[flagged]

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#23

Post by 827a » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

moritonal wrote: post #12

Contextually it might be relevant that Ruby Central said they wanted to have a Zoom call today to explain everything, then cancelled it. This was their message. "Hello Ruby Community, We recognize that our originally scheduled Q&A session overlaps with the observance of Rosh Hashanah and may not have been the best timing for many in our community. We sincerely apologize for the short notice of this change, especially…

Wow. I've seen less corpowashed decision making out of Microsoft. They set their house on fire, its burning down, but spraying water on it would get the curtains wet so we can't do that.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#24

Post by 1a527dd5 » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

Crazy to see that embrace, extend, and extinguish are still fundamental game plans.

I guess the only lesson here is trust no one and keep your repos under your account.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#25

Post by tuyosvawnt » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

it was never clear what the niche of Ruby was other than being a modernish scripting language for non-critical web dev. I remember Ruby on Rails becoming trendy for web startups with inexperienced programmers (I was one of them) to prototype things in because Active Record was a simple ORM for its time, outside of that there wasn't much other justification for the stack and since the proliferation of similar easy-to-use frameworks in other languages it hasn't been necessary

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#26

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #16

Soo let me see if I get the context. Ruby central was short for cash, Shopify used that to pressure them into a takeover of several core community repos like bundler so that Shopify can control those indirectly? Is that it?

[deleted]

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#27

Post by viccis » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

marcellus23 wrote: post #7

pyridines wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I see nothing in the post that suggests it was written with AI.

It's very clearly written with ChatGPT's authorial voice. The very prominent sprinkling of bold intensifiers, the frequent organization of things into lists to make arguments, the use of emojis in the full context pages, the overwhelming use of em dash to structure sentences, overuse of "it's — not " type cliches, etc.

It's likely because he's not a native English speaker, hence the perfect grammar and spelling in the contents of the gist, but the obvious grammatical error in the title ("Why I leave Ruby Central") that he likely typed himself.

Given his reason for doing it (non-native speaker), I don't think it's fair to really criticize him for it, but if you can't spot this as AI writing, then you might want to do some research on how to do so.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#28

Post by torben-friis » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

jaredcwhite wrote: post #19

torben-friis wrote: post #16

Soo let me see if I get the context. Ruby central was short for cash, Shopify used that to pressure them into a takeover of several core community repos like bundler so that Shopify can control those indirectly? Is that it?

In a word, yes.

What I don’t get is, what does Shopify get from this?

I’m assuming there’s a ton of reputational risk in this move, and my understanding as an outsider is that Shopify already has a ton of weight in the Ruby ecosystem - they seem to be the one case quoted by everyone as the “proof that Ruby scales”.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#29

Post by dangus » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #13

>This is not how open source works. Open source is about licensing and not about governance. There are plenty of open source projects where the owner is a dictator. In this case the owner of the github organization has control over who is a part of it and who has permissions within it.

[flagged]

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#30

Post by paulddraper » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:54 PM UTC

tuyosvawnt wrote: post #25

it was never clear what the niche of Ruby was other than being a modernish scripting language for non-critical web dev. I remember Ruby on Rails becoming trendy for web startups with inexperienced programmers (I was one of them) to prototype things in because Active Record was a simple ORM for its time, outside of that there wasn't much other justification for the stack and since the proliferation of similar easy-to-…

> it was never clear what the niche of Ruby

Ruby on Rails

Chef

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Some of the largest websites in the world run on Ruby: GitHub and Shopify.