Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

justin.searls.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 124 posts

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#111

Post by renewiltord »

4bpp wrote: post #79
renewiltord wrote: post #41

I wonder if there's a term for this kind of thing where people use the word "including". As an example, I might have a non-profit that serves soup at soup kitchens and also pays me to manage it. If someone gives $100k, suppose I pay myself $90k and use $10k to serve soup. When someone threatens to cut the contribution, I say "This will affect the non-profit's mission since the $100k a year goes to critical things lik…

I've been seeing the term "hostage puppies" being used for this for a while now; apparently it is associated with esr, though he himself disclaims credit ( https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1891528290676199513 ). It may not be a perfect fit since per the tweet, the term does not entail that there is necessarily any deceit or confusion involved - under the hostage model, the soup kitchen may be quite open about pocketing…

The LW and SSC seem to hit very close to the idea, more the former than the latter, yes. I like those. Especially the eugenics position. Thank you for that.

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#112

Post by bradgessler »

cramsession wrote: post #32
armchairhacker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out the rest of the paragraph (emphasis mine): > I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective , having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it. I also recall a figure like either $200 or $250 per hour being mentioned as the rate he was effectively paying himself. Whatever the rate actually was, I distinctly remember thinking, "h…

$200 /hr is a pretty low consulting rate. You are never going to be 100% utilized, so right off the bat you can divide that $400k by at least 50% over a long period of time. You also have to pay for your own insurance, equipment... $200 /hr would be what I would consider to be the going rate for any mid level, non-FAANG type developer and pretty fair imho!

It’s also the SF Bay Area, which h has a very high cost of living. That context is important. Also the article was corrected, the rate was $150.

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#113

Post by 999900000999 »

ChoHag wrote: post #89
999900000999 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you take my cookies, add sprinkles then resell them, I can expect a modest donation to keep the bakery running. Otherwise I'm going to run out of flour and no one gets cookies. This is the original sin of FOSS. Large mega corps end up taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth while only contributing when they feel like it. At least with . net core Microsoft ultimately pays the bills. No one knows how ot…

> But if you take my cookies, add sprinkles then resell them, I can expect a modest donation to keep the bakery running. You cannot expect any such thing. You gave them away for free. If you want to get paid, don't give your work away for free. If you give your work away for free, you cannot expect to get paid. It's shocking how frequently people who deal in rigorous logic day in, day out are unable to understand thi…

Okay, then no one gets cookies. Mega corps expect bugs to be fixed and CDNs to work.

Rate limiting access is completely reasonable. It's a sad state of affairs, because eventually we're going to end up with an internet full of Docker Desktop gacha licenses.

You can only use this if you're not at work. If your using it as a corporation you need to expense a license, then finance says ohh wow, Docker Desktop is too expensive.

Use something significantly worse.

Every large FOSS project needs to figure out it's funding at some point.

I don't want a future where I can only reliably use projects controlled by multi-billion or trillion dollar corporations. .net core is fantastic, but it's ultimately a Microsoft project in everything but name.

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#114

Post by klustregrif »

pizlonator wrote: post #92
klustregrif wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an open source org that’s running on donations and falsely implying that their donations are going to maintain server costs, yes that’s excessive. If the donations where clearly communicating that they where directly for this persons personal salary then no.

According to TFA they were saying that the donations were to pay "our team".

I honestly don’t know if you are trying to bait or just completely missed the context of that part of TFA. But in either case here is the rest of TFA on that point:

To pay our team … which initially linked to a list of the board members without any explanation of how the money was being allocated. This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#115

Post by jujube3 »

BrenBarn wrote: post #83

This is tangential to the main point of the article, but the anecdote about the dongle is interesting to me. The author's point seems to be that it was disturbing that Andre joked that being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) was no big deal. It seems to me there are three potential aspects to this: 1. Being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) 2. Joking about how that is no big deal 3. Not being transp…

There's an awful lot of dongle-related drama in Ruby these days.

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#116

Post by cyphar »

hobs wrote: post #72
afandian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that if you donate your time without pay you would still be taxed as though you _had_ been paid?

No, that's not how it works in the USA - apparently this person wants a tax deduction for their voluntary contribution as if it was a financial contribution to a non-profit which is tax deductible.

On the flip side, contributions have financial value, otherwise what are we all doing here?

I don't think they want a tax deduction necessarily, they're just pointing out that because of how voluntary labour is valued by the tax system it is rational to want to be paid for contributing to non-profits instead of doing it for free.

If you spent N hours working and donated your $X*N salary to a non-profit, you'd get a tax deduction for that amount. However if you instead spend the same N hours contributing, you get literally nothing even though the work should be valued at some fraction of $X*N if not the same value (and some laws such as campaign finance limits do treat volunteering of this form to be valued at standard rates even if it's unpaid, so this is not without precedent).

I don't think a tax deduction like that would work (everyone will pretend to be donating 16 hours of volunteer time a day), so it's back to charging for your work as a contractor.

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#117

Post by cyphar »

lamontcg wrote: post #98
GreenWatermelon wrote: post #93

Such a blatantly biased and dishonest article. In addition to what others said about TFA, This part jumped out to me: > Specifically, I was sent this commit replacing references to Homebrew from late July. As evidence of Homebrew's authorship was being erased and obscured, no additional acknowledgement was added to credit Homebrew for having created and maintained Portable Ruby since 2016. A paragraph later the autho…

Also: > In August 2025, and seemingly out of nowhere, someone pointed me to the project spinel-coop/rv-ruby, an apparent fork of homebrew/homebrew-portable-ruby. I say "apparent", because rather than using GitHub's fork button—which would have maintained clear attribution of who created the upstream project—it looks like it was instead cloned and re-pushed by Andre. GitHub has long had problems with forked repos bein…

The idea that not using the "fork" button on GitHub is somehow obscuring authorship is unhinged -- the actual license only requires you keep license headers intact (if your license headers don't convey authorship properly, you should fix that -- as an aside, this is why I don't like the "Copyright X project and contributors" thing). AFAICS, the fork even has the full commit history of the original project (which isn't even a GPL requirement) so I fail to see how anyone could reasonably see this as obscuring ownership.

As someone who has dealt with people maliciously stripping out copyright headers before, this example just smells of someone running out of examples while trying to construct a list of petty grievances. Yes, the README of the fork was updated to stop referencing the original project, what would you expect from a fork? Would it have been nice to add a note that it was forked from another project? Yes (and he did exactly that a month later), but it's really not required and I disagree not doing so it somehow hypocritical.

And yes, GitHub forks still have a lot of limitations. I wouldn't use them when creating new projects either.

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#118

Post by cyphar »

satvikpendem wrote: post #106
999900000999 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you take my cookies, add sprinkles then resell them, I can expect a modest donation to keep the bakery running. Otherwise I'm going to run out of flour and no one gets cookies. This is the original sin of FOSS. Large mega corps end up taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth while only contributing when they feel like it. At least with . net core Microsoft ultimately pays the bills. No one knows how ot…

Why would you expect that when you literally give them away for free, often with the explicit text of, do whatever you want with them?

The license also says that the software comes with "no warranty of any kind" but companies still tend to pressure maintainers to do unpaid work on their behalf to fix issues or otherwise maintain maintain the project in a way that is convenient for them.

In GP's analogy, this would be like the reseller coming back and asking you to start making gluten free varieties, using a particular kind of flour, or improving the QA of the cookie shaping process to meet their customer demands. It is beyond reasonable to say "I'm willing to do it for a fee" (or even just "no") at that point. (I also think it's reasonable to say that the reseller should give something back even if they are not legally required to do so. Not all social norms are codified in legal contracts.)

The example in TFA of Heroku wanting an older release branch to continue being maintained for free falls under that umbrella -- just as you are free to do whatever you want with the source code, as a maintainer I am also free to say that extra work will cost extra. In that situation, Heroku can either pay one of their own engineers to continue maintaining old release branches and working around issues, or they can pay the upstream maintainer to do that work.

IMHO the "gatekeeping" model is the only funding model that has actually ever worked for open source software -- it's how RedHat, SUSE, and many other open source companies make their money. (I work for SUSE, but also maintain a fair number of open source projects.)

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#119

Post by cyphar »

lamontcg wrote: post #97
bradly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a similar feeling. The article’s title and closing paragraph reference not taking a side, but sandwiched between those are a lot of words that to me clearly indicate a “side” taken by the author. Through all this I will say that Ruby Central hired a non-technical director whose responsibilities I would expect to include communication and operational expertise to not let these situations happen or at least conta…

Yeah, you can total up all the things he's said about Andre Arko, and even just accepting all of his spin and framing, I don't understand how it adds up to Shopify's actions being legitimate. And I was part of the Ruby community for the period being addressed in the blog post, and I interacted with him back then, and he was certainly at a minimum difficult to deal with. None of it seems to be relevant at all to what…

> Also, in not into the faux shock at him paying himself $200-$250/hr as his rate for RT.

The article has been updated and the correct figure appears to have been $150/hr. That seems very cheap for a contracting rate -- another comment[1] went through RT's public disclosures and it seems that he was getting paid ~$30k/yr on average (with a maximum of $60k for one year) which paints a completely different picture to TFA.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45408505

Re: Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco

#120

Post by satvikpendem »

cyphar wrote: post #118
satvikpendem wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect that when you literally give them away for free, often with the explicit text of, do whatever you want with them?

The license also says that the software comes with "no warranty of any kind" but companies still tend to pressure maintainers to do unpaid work on their behalf to fix issues or otherwise maintain maintain the project in a way that is convenient for them. In GP's analogy, this would be like the reseller coming back and asking you to start making gluten free varieties, using a particular kind of flour, or improving the…

It comes with no warranty of any kind, just as it says. Sounds like the actual problem is that OSS devs are often too spineless to say no. It's not a technical problem, it's a social one. Just say no.
Post reply on HN