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A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

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Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#161

Post by jemmyw »

padjo wrote: post #69
lloeki wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA: > Let's get some kind of committer agreement in place with those folks who need access (the same way many other high profile open source projects have), and remove access from those who don't, while still being fully open to accepting PRs and being open to re-welcoming them as committers if they decide that is how they want to spend their time in the future. > Here's the challenge. How do you tell someone t…

Ruby Central sponsors him to work on the project. They also own the project. Sure it’s not ideal that they’ve apparently come to an impasse of some sort but locking him out is not bonkers.

> They also own the project

I've seen some contention around that. RC owns the rubygems infrastructure. But it's not clear that they should own the repos of the open source rubygems or bundler projects that they use. They just seem to have fallen to that organization by way of some admin owner passing through, rather than an official hand off.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#162

Post by lightbritefight »

hluska wrote: post #56
rubiest2010 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add, did Ruby Central consider going to the community and asking for funding so they wouldn’t have to be beholden to one or a small group of key funders? If they were at risk of shutting down without this funding source I think the community might have rallied around them so they could make more independent decisions in the best interests of the community. This is not to say that they didn’t act in the best intere…

This program is public and has been for a very long time - it’s called the Community Support Program because Windows devs don’t have enough nightmares of the acronym CSP. Do you contribute? I can send you a link if you don’t.

Why would someone contribute to Ruby central now, when the org has been shown to be callous and incompetent stewards who are utterly incapable of showing even minimal respect to their community?

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#163

Post by phatskat »

actionfromafar wrote: post #57
nightpool wrote: post #3

So Ruby Central, by their own admission, agreed to take $$$$$ of funding on the premise that they would "secure RubyGems against supply chain attacks", and then sat on their hands not doing anything about it until a few days before the deadline, when it was too late to seek community consensus or figure out a good transition plan. So they ended up screwing over everybody who was actually doing work on the project in…

To my untrained eye it looks like a board with a bunch of money and perhaps a fork on their hands.

This definitely has a Mullenweg-esque scent to it.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#164

Post by lightbritefight »

skywhopper wrote: post #84

Honestly this description makes me even more concerned. There’s a lot of “I don’t know what happened” and “I wasn’t involved” and “apparently we agreed to”. In particular, after a long winded introduction and setting of the scene, suddenly there’s a mention out of the blue of a 24 hour deadline to cut off access or face losing funding (forever)? But who was holding this deadline over the board’s head is not explained…

The poster is the treasurer too. How can he not know where the money is coming from and what constraints its beholden to?

Wildly unprofessional or just willful lying.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#165

Post by simianparrot »

em-bee wrote: post #159
simianparrot wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And look at Germany now. I have friends and family there. Merkel’s utopian naïveté has certainly not benefited Germany at this point. It went way too far. I can’t believe people are like this. But it explains why Europe is more and more split on this topic: It’s two irreconcilable worldviews and one of them requires ignoring observed reality.

you are completely missing the point. what exactly should germany have done? let those people suffer? stick them in crowded refugee camps? you do not get to turn a generous humanitarian aid gesture into blaming germany for being dumb to let all these people in. this is not ignoring observed reality. observed reality is a consequence of people not being welcoming enough. of not being supporting and considerate of the…

I’m sorry, but not being welcoming _enough_!? Seeing the incredible, life altering strain the German model has put on the lower and middle class while they’ve bent over backwards to be more welcoming to strangers that share none of their values and consistently and purposefully alienate themselves from the general German population, I simply cannot agree we are observing the same reality.

Full disclaimer: Some of my friends are also immigrants from the 80’s. And they’re equally exacerbated by the state of Germany because the country and culture they love is deteriorating out of suicidal empathy.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#166

Post by ____mr____ »

rramon wrote: post #153
____mr____ wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, racists often include ethnic features such as hair texture or even nose shape within their criteria for racial exclusion. While in certain cultural contexts Turks may be read as white, within Europe there is a history of excluding them from whiteness and presenting them as a threat to European culture, mostly due to Islamophobia

Ethnic features = things you can nothing for, same category as skin color. I was talking about the culture you chose and the stereotypes that go along with it. Stereotypes override ethnic features unless you actually deal with real racists. DHH might not be street smart enough (like most people in tech) to see through those stereotypes on the streets of London.

I'm not sure I completely understand what you are saying.

You start your original comment by asking what makes Turks non white which I answered, and from what I understand you believe that choosing to participate in a culture from the diaspora you are a part of means that you have to bear the burden of the stereotypes about that culture, even if they are racist in nature? And furthermore, you believe that people that believe these stereotypes are not real racists because real racists only care about skin color?

Again, I could be misunderstanding, but I don't think that you need to only care about skin color to be racist. I think that DHH's anxieties about replacement of naitives being mostly focused on MENA people feels like a pretty clear sign he believes that non European (aka non white) immigrants are a problem, which to me, is racist.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#167

Post by maleldil »

kgwgk wrote: post #135
maleldil wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People" have differing opinions, but the one I mostly see from the left is that they want Palestinians to live in the land they owned before Israeli colonisers invaded it and forced them to relocate to subhuman conditions. What I haven't seen is the desire to expel the Israelis currently living there, as long as they agree to let the Palestinians lead a decent life.

You have never seen the slogan “from the river to the sea”? https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP... Do you think that the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian dispute is for Arab states to absorb the Palestinians, for there to be two states, Israel and Palestine, or for Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians? 51% in the 18-24 group chose the third option.

When the Israeli government says it, they mean removing or exterminating all Palestinians on "their" land. When Palestinians and their allies say it, they mean they want to live in their land without fearing for their lives.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#168

Post by kgwgk »

maleldil wrote: post #167
kgwgk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have never seen the slogan “from the river to the sea”? https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP... Do you think that the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian dispute is for Arab states to absorb the Palestinians, for there to be two states, Israel and Palestine, or for Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians? 51% in the 18-24 group chose the third option.

When the Israeli government says it, they mean removing or exterminating all Palestinians on "their" land. When Palestinians and their allies say it, they mean they want to live in their land without fearing for their lives.

Not sure what land is “their” land in the first sentence but the are as many Palestinians citizens of Israel as there are Palestinians living in Gaza - and I don’t think the former fear much more for their lives than other citizens of Israel.

Maybe you don’t think that most college-age people in the US - who according to that survey would like Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians rather than see a two-state solution - are allies of Palestinians but surely they are not allies of Israel.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#169

Post by phatskat »

nyeah wrote: post #23

[flagged]

I think a lot of people did read the OP and were left wanting - I know I did and was.

Breaking down the posted article, there’s a lot missing (which the author admits), and it’s not clear really what the goal of the post was other than to say “someone, not me, made an oops. But it’s fine, right, because the community needed this to happen.”

Parts that were particularly odd, that others have said with better words:

- Who imposed this ultimatum on RC? - How long was the timeline to “tighten things up”? It sounds like there was both a decent amount of time and an immediate urgency - it can’t be both. - “We’re nerds who can’t communicate well” (paraphrased) is such a poor argument - I get it, I’ve had to do a lot of work to figure out how to navigate social spaces and how to communicate effectively in professional settings. That said, the author is writing as if they’ve never had a single conversation with a technical person that they didn’t know well; that any conversation about removing or reducing access would be a catastrophe. That’s ridiculous.

It seems that either there was poor planning around this, or someone forgot about the deadline and YOLO’d it, or there was a malicious push to oust some of the biggest contributors under the guise of security.

One thing is clear, regardless of what the root cause of this all was: RC showed a deep lack of respect for the people that make their community what it is, and that stinks.

Re: A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

#170

Post by phatskat »

corytheboyd wrote: post #95
jaredcwhite wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? This article is absolutely damning re: RC's leadership and the utter lack of proper transparency, strategic planning, marketing/PR, and solid OSS governance. Did we read the same article?!

Honestly I don’t know how to feel about it anymore, but I found the rhetoric way too explosive at the time, when nothing was really known. Now that some time has passed, and more has been said… yeah I get your point too. Ruby has been a HUGE part of building my career, I don’t want to see it slide away one questionable move at a time into full corporate control. It’s not TOO hard to see how this whole thing could jus…

I hate this for the community - I’m an outsider, who always wanted to give Ruby (and Rails) a good swing. However, after this, and after learning about dhh’s awful (imo) stances, I’m not ever going to go near any of it.

I had a similar “yuck” when WPEngine started taking Mullenweg to task over all of the WordPress shenanigans - that hit a lot closer to home for me, as I’ve spent about half of my career building great sites and applications on top of Wordpress. Although I’ve moved on, I was still an active contributor on the WP StackExchange and had my ear to the ground in several plugin repos I authored for employers who contributed to Five for the Future, and replied to comments on blog posts from people who found my previous insights helpful.

I have zero interest to ever go back to that project because of how poorly it’s been managed - if you want to see one man completely wreck an open-source ecosystem, it’s quite a fascinating if not depressing story.

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