Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems [pdf]

This was not a misunderstanding. It was a hostile takeover of key infrastructure, undermining both the long-standing maintainers and the broader community that relies on RubyGems and Bundler every day.

The Ruby ecosystem thrives on collaboration, openness, and mutual respect. What we've witnessed over the past week violates those principles. Ruby Central's actions - unilateral access revocations, exclusion of experienced volunteers, and refusal to engage in transparent dialogue - are not just organizational missteps. They're a threat to the decentralized and community-driven spirit that has sustained Ruby for decades.

I oppose this power grab.

Even more concerning is the idea that contributor access could become contingent on employment status or ideological alignment. Whether someone is employed by Ruby Central - or holds left-leaning, right-leaning, or apolitical views - should have no bearing on their ability to contribute to open source. Merit, dedication, and community trust must remain the foundation.

If Ruby Central is serious about supporting the Ruby community, they must:

- Immediately restore access to all maintainers removed during this incident.

- Publicly commit to a transparent, community-driven governance model, similar to what the RubyGems team had begun drafting.

- Respect the autonomy of open source maintainers, regardless of whether they are employed by Ruby Central.

- Acknowledge the harm caused by these actions and engage in meaningful dialogue to rebuild trust.

The Ruby community has always been about people - diverse, passionate, and united by a love for a beautiful language. It's time we demand that the institutions claiming to represent us act accordingly.

And if Ruby Central does not do this we must pressure sponsors to stop funding Ruby Central and ultimately; if all else fails, we must build and maintain our own infrastructure unencumbered by these shenanigans. Also, in order to re-establish trust in the community; the people responsible for causing this ruckus should be fired.

Ruby-Level Sponsors (Top Tier): Alpha Omega, Shopify, Sidekiq

Gold-Level Sponsor Flagrant

Silver-Level Sponsors: Cedarcode, DNSimple, Fastly, Gusto, Honeybadger, Sentry

For future reference, the flagged parent comment was: "Slop."

is this becoming the latest way to attack an idea? instead of engaging with the actual content you just claim it is AI and therefore it can be ignored? seems disingenuous to say the least.

Is there any evidence of this? It's not in the PDF.

Also, this comment is clearly AI and more importantly, it affects the quality. Ex: "It's time we demand that the institutions claiming to represent us act accordingly." It seems "the institutions" have been representing them fine until now, why "it's time"? "This was not a misunderstanding. It was a hostile takeover"..."This was a hostile takeover" (or "is", it's still ongoing). "The recent actions taken by Ruby Central - [list]...Ruby Central's actions - [different list]"...the comment tries to explain what Ruby Central has done and what the maintainers demand, but it's vague and disorganized; the linked PDF is better.

It's pointing out that the person who posted something couldn't be bothered to actually write it themselves. The "content" is the prompt, which is of course never shared because it's probably so trite that it's not going to get anyone's interest unless it's stochastically decompressed into a large amount of text.

Like the sibling commenter, I do not write Ruby and do not care about this conflict apart from a general interest in supply chain stuff. I'm merely tired of the constant encroachment of obvious LLM prose in HN submissions and (albeit less commonly) in comments.

Who is "we"? And what did they witness?

All we got right now is one side of the story.

It is indeed surprising such change wouldn't be immediately followed by a public announcement, but they've been founding and managing RubyGems for a very long time now, so it's not even clear to me how this can be a "takeover".

I'll happily join with my pitchfork if it turns out this is indeed a malevolent move, but until I've read their side of the story, I'd rather wait and see.

Edit: 35 minutes later, here we go: https://rubycentral.org/news/strengthening-the-stewardship-o...

That's because Ruby Central chooses not to communicate. I'm not going to reserve judgment against intentionally mute hostile actors.

Well, we have all of Ruby Centrals actions including their action to not be more public during these actions. Their actions are their story. If their actions don't communicate their intent, that is on them to handle that in a professional way to not be in this situation.

What's with the "contingent on employment status or ideological alignment" bit about? That's not been mentioned anywhere else so far.

Were those parts (or indeed your entire comment) written with the help of an LLM?

  >- Immediately restore access to all maintainers removed during this incident. […]

  Markdown bullet points in a place with no markdown support.

Read the post more clearly before accusing someone of LLM usage. And even if it is, they are still valid points to be discussed, as opposed to trying to bury it with an LLM accusation.

Unless that effect is to make yourself more angry and to have your comments downvoted in order to feel more righteous and to justify your behavior... but otherwise this won't change anything.

Please do write a blog post about, and feel free to share it on HN.

Clearly, that was because this information directly supports readers following through on the call to action: “And if Ruby Central does not do this we must pressure sponsors to stop funding Ruby Central”. That’s obvious.

> What's with the "contingent on employment status or ideological alignment" bit about? That's not been mentioned anywhere else so far.

Yes, both the original pdf and the RubyCentral statement edplicitly refer to admin status being made contingent on being full-time employee of RubyCentral. If you just mean no one has explicitly brought upthe ideological angle, well, that’s a fairly easy concer to reach wrih something being contingent on employment at a particular nonprofit, so it would be weird to interogate like this even if you had clearly focussed on kn just that point.

If that's what happened then it's bad because it leaves people who read the comment confused - hence my questions asking about those.

If the author confirms that those pieces I asked about serve an intentional purpose then I don't care if they used an LLM or not.

My problem isn't with using LLMs to help write comments - there are plenty of reasonable reasons for doing that (like English as a second language). My problem is letting an LLM invent content that doesn't accurately represent the situation or reflect the LLM user's own position.

(The author could also say "I didn't use an LLM", which notably they haven't done elsewhere on this thread yet.)

> "Their work laid much of the foundation we are building on today, and we are committed to carrying that legacy forward with the same spirit of openness and collaboration."

what do they mean by openness, it doesn't even say who wrote this

The cancellation of DHH's keynote was purely political. At that time, RubyCentral's response was similarly uncommunicative and their explanation was BS.

This is not the first strike.

The paragraph immediately preceding the list begins with a sentence mentioning the sponsors. How did you not see this?

> What's with the "contingent on employment status or ideological alignment" bit about? That's not been mentioned anywhere else so far.

“not been mentioned anywhere else” is false. If you click on the PDF linked to in this very post it mentions that only full time employees of RubyCentral maintained access to their GitHub account.

I find it ironic that you’re so quick to question whether something is LLM-authored given that you write so much about using LLMs.

I don't mind if it's LLM-assisted text if everything in it is a reviewed and accurate representation of the point the author is trying to make.

But if the LLM throws in extra junk tha distracts from the conversation and the author fails to catch that in review, that's bad.

I think it's likely I was mistaken here - that the author either didn't use an LLM or used it for minor style tweaks but ensured that it was making the points they wanted to make.

Public hostility towards anyone right of Zohran Mamdani

(Personally I'd still like to see the author clarify if they used an LLM or not, but that's more for my own personal curiosity at this point, to check if my radar needs adjusting.)