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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

#91

Post by kgwgk »

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.

> since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer.

Simultaneously?

You’re taxed for paid labor - you’re not taxed for unpaid labor.

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

#92

Post by pizlonator »

klustregrif wrote: post #62
pizlonator wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#93

Post by GreenWatermelon »

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 author writes

> In fairness to Andre, the rv-ruby repo continues to retain a copy of Homebrew's LICENSE.txt which names "Homebrew contributors" as the copyright holder. Andre also later added an explicit acknowledgement to the README, but that attribution came more than a month later, and (I'm told) only after he was directly asked to credit the original project.

"In fairness" my ass. How can the author leverage a claim of authorship being erased, when the license is sitting there, untouched, for over a year?

And when someone told Andre to credit the original project... He simply did? Seemingly without any issues. In what universe is this an example of "obscuring authorship"?

Of course, putting this section right after the section where Andre mistakingly accused google of copying code without perserving the original license, leads you to think Andre is a hypocrite, when in fact there were over 7 years between the two "events". The storytelling is doubly dishonest because as Andre kept the original license intact, rendering all implicit claims of hypocrisy void.

In short, this article is borderline defamation.

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

#94

Post by wgjordan »

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…

As a non-profit, the exact amount that Ruby Together paid Andre was publicly disclosed in its annual tax filings [1]:

2015: $29,250

2016: $43,988

2017: $48,143

2018: $51,058

2019: $60,000

2020: $32,693

2021: $21,420

The filings also note that "The entire board of directors reviews and approves (by vote) compensation for the CEO."

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...

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

#95

Post by mystraline »

kgwgk wrote: post #91
mystraline wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer. Simultaneously? You’re taxed for paid labor - you’re not taxed for unpaid labor.

Rich people can donate money, and they take large tax writeoffs for it.

The rest of us have our labor. No matter how professional we are and donate, we cannot get tax writeoffs for donation of our labor.

I am pointing out the hypocrisy of our econo-social class's primary possession, and how the richies get tax writeoffs, and the labor class gets shit on.

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

#96

Post by wgjordan »

armchairhacker wrote: post #44
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!

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…

It's a legal requirement for most US non-profits to file public and accurate accounting of their funds and expenses, Ruby Together is no exception and all the info is publicly available [1].

Having previously worked as a software engineer at an ed-tech non-profit, I found nothing nefarious or unusual in Andre receiving compensation for his work or in the anecdotes around expensing business-related technology purchases or meals to his employer, this is all standard industry practice.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...

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

#97

Post by lamontcg »

bradly wrote: post #31
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 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 just happened. Whatever Andre did or didn't do with Ruby Together funds, that organization no longer exists.

Also, in not into the faux shock at him paying himself $200-$250/hr as his rate for RT. He's presumably paying his own health care and living in SF so that actually seems pretty reasonable. If he was employed at a tech company earning that much, nobody would bat an eyelash.

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

#98

Post by lamontcg »

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 being half broken compared to the original repo. Used to be that you couldn't search within forked repos, at the very least.

I'd actually consider it best practice to push to a new repo if you were entirely taking over a project and weren't going to be pushing upstream.

I haven't extensively researched if GH has managed to eliminate all the reduced features of forks, but after something like 15 years of using it (proabably about the same amount of time Andre has), I would reflexively establish a fresh main repo if I was setting up a project and I wouldn't fork.

This isn't really evidence of anything other than the author of the blog post looking to spin a narrative.

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

#99

Post by dmurray »

bradly wrote: post #86
dmurray wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's explaining why he's not taking André Arko's side, which one can infer he's been asked to do. No one is expecting him to speak out in favour of Ruby Central's side, and he several times mentions how poorly they've executed and communicated whatever they're trying to do. And the complaints about that are well-known to anyone reading this post, and don't need to be rehashed. So no, I think he is indeed reserving ju…

Huh. I just don’t read that post and think, this is an unbiased take by someone reserving judgment.

Well, let's say he's clearly not taking Arko's side but he's reserving judgment on whether Ruby Central did a reasonable thing or whether it's "a plague on both your houses".

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

#100

Post by kgwgk »

mystraline wrote: post #95
kgwgk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer. Simultaneously? You’re taxed for paid labor - you’re not taxed for unpaid labor.

Rich people can donate money, and they take large tax writeoffs for it. The rest of us have our labor. No matter how professional we are and donate, we cannot get tax writeoffs for donation of our labor. I am pointing out the hypocrisy of our econo-social class's primary possession, and how the richies get tax writeoffs, and the labor class gets shit on.

You can sell that labor “you cannot afford” to donate to someone else - and donate the money you receive for it. So you get a tax write off instead of getting shat on or whatever.
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