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I'm leaving Ruby Central

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Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#61

Post by rmoriz »

ipaddr wrote: post #44
rmoriz wrote: post #37

Ruby Central should have been more involved in the development of rubygems (software) in the past and establish a community and contribution guideline, to secure the project, secure funding, maybe separating concerns (infrastructure, conferences, etc.) However, taking away funding as retaliation for a conference talk is offensive, too. In the end facts (money) made the decision. I don't think Shopify has bad intentio…

From my reading it was about rv the new tool that hopes to replace rubygems and the push to remove the competition. The losing of sponsorships because of the talk is what gave shopify leverage. And they used it.. out of fear over the rv tool.

The offensive statement from the 'rv' readme is clearly alarming. Shopify, as every other Ruby user, is highly dependent of a working rubygems infrastructure. I can fully understand their motivation, to clarify the situation and to implement rules and separation of concerns. However, it's clear, that the whole process was a disaster in communication, planning, execution by Ruby Central.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#64

Post by jcmfernandes »

flkiwi wrote: post #39
torben-friis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

There are arguably larger reputational risk issues in a company with significant financial/payment activities not having adequate control of their technology. I'm not saying that justifies anything here as I don't know nearly enough about, but I'd wager that even a minor incident arising from them not adequately controlling their stack would create infinitely more issues than this move.

Exactly. While it seems like the overarching goals were well-suited, the process was... WTF.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#65

Post by dcrazy »

hosh wrote: post #41
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-…

The proliferation of frameworks came about from the ideas and design of Ruby on Rails. MVC and ORM had been around before web apps, but it was not consistently used in a web framework until Rails. Convention-over-configuration, “nested doll pattern”, and Rack protocol were all ideas widely ported and copied into other language platforms and frameworks. Also, ActiveRecord gained significant capabilities with named sco…

> MVC and ORM had been around before web apps, but it was not consistently used in a web framework until Rails.

WebObjects and EOF were the MVC and ORM frameworks powering Disney (Go.com) almost a decade before Rails existed.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#67

Post by teeray »

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?

> 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

Sounds like a variant of the xz takeover, but using money this time and in public.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#68

Post by bradly »

hosh wrote: post #54
bradly wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a source for that? I always wondered why Merb disappeared, even after Katz refactored Rails to use ideas from Merb.

Straight from the Katz mouth via https://yehudakatz.com/2020/02/19/together-the-merb-story/:

> But not everyone felt so good about it. I worked for Engine Yard, and we had made our mark selling Ruby on Rails deployment to large customers like Groupon, Kongregate and Github. I got hired at Engine Yard in part because the company's founders were worried that Rails wouldn't make it long-term. They wanted to hedge against this possibility.

> Unfortunately for me, waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy.

> I don't know everything that went on behind the scenes, but Engine Yard's management eventually asked me to consider merging with Rails. If I'm being honest, they pushed me to consider merging with Rails.

I'm sure there were other reasons for the merge as well, and I don't want to take anything away from Yehuda and the decision he made at the time, but I was a volunteer at the first MerbConf just a couple months before the "merge" and it all felt very sudden and at odds with the direction the project was headed. I had my cynical take that EY was behind the move, but those were just my personal feelings. Honestly it was refreshing to read Yehuda's story 12 years later as it helped put some of the pieces together as to why.

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#69

Post by hosh »

ipaddr wrote: post #44
rmoriz wrote: post #37

Ruby Central should have been more involved in the development of rubygems (software) in the past and establish a community and contribution guideline, to secure the project, secure funding, maybe separating concerns (infrastructure, conferences, etc.) However, taking away funding as retaliation for a conference talk is offensive, too. In the end facts (money) made the decision. I don't think Shopify has bad intentio…

From my reading it was about rv the new tool that hopes to replace rubygems and the push to remove the competition. The losing of sponsorships because of the talk is what gave shopify leverage. And they used it.. out of fear over the rv tool.

Chances are, this will make rv into a bigger success. Assuming the rv developers delivers on their promises. (I tried using their first version on launch only to find that the features I wanted have not been written yet).

Where are you getting that Shopify fears rv?

Re: I'm leaving Ruby Central

#70

Post by lamontcg »

pityJuke wrote: post #32
torben-friis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

From all I can observe, it does seem to have a sinister political undertone. In that, Ruby Central's collapse started because Sidekiq disagreed with them platforming dhh, and then Shopify (who has dhh as a board member, and whose CEO races with dhh) used the funding weakness to demand a purge of anyone they disagreed with. As an aside, I imagine the discussion of this will be end up being... difficult, because people…

> who has dhh as a board member, and whose CEO races with dhh

Oh, so this is just dhh doing a hostile takeover of core ruby infrastructure where previously he had to try to work with people, now he can just tell people what he wants to be done, because they work for him.

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