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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

#61

Post by mperham »

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…

The eventual rate paid by Ruby Together settled on $150/hr and has remained that amount for the last decade. Justin’s data is far out of date.

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

#62

Post by klustregrif »

pizlonator wrote: post #51
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…

400k/yr is excessive?

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.

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

#63

Post by bgentry »

runjake wrote: post #47

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…

Aaron did RT the post here which likely indicates some agreement with the sentiment in it: https://x.com/searls/status/1972293469193351558

Also he shared it directly while saying it was good here: https://x.com/tenderlove/status/1972370330892321197

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

#64

Post by hn8726 »

I'm sorry but the article seems pretty biased, and doesn't really give any argument for why what happened would be in any way justified. Author keeps adding their own interpretation to Github comments and events, which — just by looking at the contents — are needlessly negative. For example [1] where commit message states

> We've been continuing to backport bugfixs to the 1.7.x series just for Heroku, but unless Heroku joins Ruby Together I don't have enough time available to make sure that continues to happen.

but OP claims it

> was interpreted as leveraging his control over Bundler as a pay-to-play scheme

I'm sorry but not supporting outdated versions of an open-source tool for a business is perfectly reasonable.

Similarly, [2] was again is described as "was interpreted at the time as indicating the feature would be withheld from Bundler because Heroku had failed to pay Ruby Together.". This is not at all how I read it — the comment just says that the open source project has priorities and not all of them can be implemented given the level of funding it has.

These are just two examples, but the article is riddled with wording like "blatant copying", "brazenly hypocritical", "was interpreted as [a bad thing]" etc.

I just feel like reading a clearly lopsided political piece intended to incite negative emotions towards something/someone. There are just enough facts to make it sound fact-based, but enough of author's own feelings and interpretation that I'm not at all convinced.

In fact, towards the end the author even states that there's been ~6 years where nothing of note happened, before the current drama. That seems like a relatively healthy situation?

[1] https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby/pull/385/com... [2] https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/1811#issuecommen...

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

#65

Post by baggy_trough »

davidcelis wrote: post #53
runjake wrote: post #47

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…

Some additional context is that Justin Searls is close friends with people who are or have been on Rails Core and/or at Shopify. I've long been a fan of Justin's work, and I've spent time with him at conferences so I can attest to him being a nice person in my experience… But, given the alleged parties at play here, it's hard to take this piece as unbiased when it lacks that disclosure

[flagged]

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

runjake wrote: post #47

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…

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by sevenseacat »

runjake wrote: post #47

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…

Aaron has shared this same article, on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/tenderlove.dev/post/3lzw5byy7xc24

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

#68

Post by chipotle_coyote »

pizlonator wrote: post #51
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…

400k/yr is excessive?

"Excessive" is obviously a subjective measurement. At times I don't think that HN's median audience appreciates that a 400k/yr salary is objectively extremely high, even for software engineers, even in 2025. A "mere" $367K/yr total compensation puts you in the 90th percentile of SWE earnings. I know Google, Facebook, and a few others greatly exceed that in total compensation at their higher SWE levels, but they're probably not the baseline you should be looking at across the industry.

I would personally say that $400K/yr for being an open source developer is fantastic, although I appreciate that that's also subjective. Even in Silicon Valley, though, $400K/yr would net you about $18K/month, which would be enough to live quite comfortably while still socking away more than half of your income for retirement.

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

#69

Post by afandian »

mystraline wrote: post #55
cramsession wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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!

And in the USA, if you volunteer professional labor, you cannot take it off on your taxes. So yeah, if I can't get the benefit of taking off of my taxes, I do want paid. Can't afford it otherwise, since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer.

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

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

#70

Post by byroot »

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.

> not really about the current events?

It's exposing events that have been somewhat of an semi-open secret among Ruby maintainers for a very long time.

The link with the current events is that so far, neither Ruby Central nor Shopify have responded to Joel Drapper accusations, so the vast majority of people only have one side of the story.

Justin is just explaining why, based on what he knows of one of the main protagonists's character, he'd rather reserve judgment. Which also happens to be my stance ever since this thing started.

For multiple years now, I've heard more than one people involved in Ruby Central telling me they were very worried of the Ruby Central relationship with André. Whether they had reasons to be worried or whether they were blowing it out of proportion, I can't say for sure. All I can say is that there was massive trust issues.

Whether he actually did something that triggered the recent events, or whether RC or Shopify tried to act proactively I don't know either. But I can only suspect that RC and Shopify are not speaking out, or at least are slow at doing it, because of potential legal consequence.

NB: Until not long ago, I was employed by Shopify, if I still was today I wouldn't be writing this comment.

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