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

justin.searls.co

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

#41

Post by renewiltord »

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 like all the soup served at kitchens".

The impression is to imply that the majority of it goes to the soup. But the majority doesn't, in fact, go to the soup.

It would be useful to have a concise term for this particular kind of deceitfulness.

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

#42

Post by renewiltord »

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!

Seems fine to me if it's well known so that donors know what they're getting.

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

#43

Post by 999900000999 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #29
999900000999 wrote: post #5

[flagged]

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…

400k is about the total comp for most FANG devs. Plus theirs no proof he was constantly billing that.

The only issue is a lack of transparency.

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

#44

Post by armchairhacker »

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!

Another part of the article mentions him "wasting" money

> Andre needed an adapter, so I ran up to lend him mine. As he was giving it back, I recall him making a half-joking, flippant remark about either his dongle or his computer, saying that "Ruby Together will just buy me another one." It really rubbed me the wrong way. Over the years to follow, more than one person told me stories of Andre paying for shared meals on behalf of Ruby Together without an apparent legitimate justification.

The article also accuses him of misrepresenting if not lying where certain donations went when soliciting more. Presumably, if he had justified reasons to need more funds, he could've said them.

Granted, we don't know how much Andre was making and what his expenses were, and the article seems to have its own biases. But I think at least the general outline of Andre's (and his organization's) funds/expenses should be public and accurate, so potential donors can decide whether he really needs their funds or another project needs them more.

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

#45

Post by aeon_ai »

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…

Some languages, such as English, have a term for this -

It's called "lying".

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

#46

Post by saghm »

From the outside, I'd argue that the most neutral way to interpret all of this is to assume good faith and trust every statement that hasn't been explicitly disagreed with by another party. Between what I've read before this blog post and what the author says here, that would lead me to conclude that Andre had years of behaving unprofessionally to Ruby Central and at least on one occasion towards Shopify itself, and then recently when Shopify became the de facto only funding source of Ruby Central, they demanded that Ruby Central take over RubyGems and Bundler, and as part of that, Andre got removed. The lack of communication around it just makes it seem like they had every motivation to try to remove him specifically, and took quite drastic actions to do so, but for unstated reasons chose not to publicize this aspect of it. If this were actually what the stated intentions of the changes were, I might understand it, even if I felt that using financial pressure on a third-party organization to remove someone from a different organization was a bit heavy-handed. Without that, it's hard to feel like this new context changes things much; even if he deserved the outcome personally, making huge changes to infrastructure that a huge community relies on to remove him seems like something worthwhile to be transparent about, and it doesn't do much to raise the level of trust that their stewardship of the infrastructure will be handled responsibly.

My opinion on this might change if the timeline of what happened were challenged in some meaningful way, but allusions to "details that would contradict fact-checks and timelines others have pieced together and published" isn't that. The only way to steel-man an argument that isn't stated is to assume infallibility, and that's just not reasonable to ask people to do.

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

#47

Post by runjake »

Context: Justin Searls is a “high profile” person in the Ruby and Rails community. He has a reputation for being a nice person and behaving in good faith.

From a personal standpoint, I can easily take his words at face value. I’m also curious about the views of Aaron “tenderlove” Patterson, who has a similar reputation.

Now that Justin has spoken out, maybe Aaron will take the opportunity to. Both tend to stay out of drama.

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

#48

Post by 999900000999 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #30
999900000999 wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Expecting to get paid for open source work is like expecting that people don't pay you for cookies they take from your store labeled "Free Cookies."

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 other independent FOSS projects are supposed to be funded.

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

#49

Post by rglover »

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…

Fraud

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

#50

Post by pizlonator »

its-summertime wrote: post #8

This seems to be mostly "I dislike Andre" and not really about the current events? I think a total of half a paragraph is about current events in any form.

I think it's trying to say "here are shady things Andre did that might have led to the current events".
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