A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

https://pup-e.com/goodbye-rubygems.pdf

> On September 9th, with no warning or communication, a RubyGems maintainer unilaterally:

> renamed the “RubyGems” GitHub enterprise to “Ruby Central”,

> added non-maintainer Marty Haught of Ruby Central, and

> removed every other maintainer of the RubyGems project.

> On September 18th, with no explanation, Marty Haught revoked GitHub organization membership for all admins on the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org maintainer teams

Which is important context that was left out of this board member's statement.

Between the initial removal of access, then giving it back after explaining it was a mistake; the people involved started a conversation about governance to clarify/fix things.

https://github.com/rubygems/rfcs/pull/61

The conversation terminated because the majority of those people then had their access revoked again.

When weighing the facts here; which group or claimant has the most evidence for their claims? The technical folks with lots of commits over many years, or the treasurer of an organisation who says the impetus for this was a "funding deadline" so all access had to be seized?

I think this person has good cause for being very upset at the lack of communication and the sudden removal of them from the organization. They were a maintainer of RubyGems for a decade.

Sounds like they made some really big changes and put zero effort into communicating to people who've spent 10+ years working on the project.

> How do you tell someone that has had commit and admin access to critical infrastructure long after that need has expired that you need to revoke that access without upsetting them?

The first thing is they didn't tell them. The second bit is simple:

"Hi [x], I'm sure you've seen the news about npm. Given supply chain attacks directed at them and the one recently foiled against the python folks, we're [doing fill in here], including reducing permissions. [More info here.] Further updates as soon as we have them."

That email takes 10 minutes to write and send.

Reasonable people would've accepted that fine. And you don't have to worry about unreasonable people, because most people will find them unreasonable and dismiss anything they say.

You responded with an ad-hominem attack. If you can offer a rebuttal of the facts then please do, otherwise try to refrain from personal attacks.

A maintainer of RubyGems was forcibly removed from the RubyGems GitHub org — which was renamed to Ruby Central — along with every other maintainer. Then access was restored, then revoked again. There was no explanation, no communication, and no understandable reasoning for this.

And still! If there is an "official" statement, I can't find one on https://rubycentral.org/.

This wildly transcends "issues with both internal and external communication" or "we're just a bunch of makers who can't be expected to be good at organization or communication" (to highly paraphrase TFA). This is an absolutely disastrous breach of the community's trust.

And communicating [situation], [action(s)], [how this affects you] is one of the most basic professional communication skills you could imagine.

> less emotional,

Expressing emotions is good, actually.

I should not have skimmed it. From your link:

> In the same post he praises Tommy Robinson (actual name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon), a right-wing agitator with several convictions for violent offences and a long history of association with far-right groups such as the English Defence League and the British Nationalist Party. He then goes on to describe those that attended last weekend’s far-right rally in London as “perfectly normal, peaceful Brits” protesting against the “demographic nightmare” that has enveloped London, despite the violence and disorder they caused.

> To all of that he ads a dash of Islamophobia, citing “Pakistani rape gangs” as one of the reasons for the unrest, repeating a weaponised trope borne from a long since discredited report from the Quilliam Foundation, an organisation with ties to both the the US Tea Party, and Tommy Robinson himself.

This is ... disqualifying. That's the best word I can summon here to express my dismay. This is a crossed line. Absolutely nutso.

edit2: Uh wow I really should not have skimmed it. Here's one paragraph from DHH's blog itself:

> Which brings us back to Robinson's powerful march yesterday. The banner said "March for Freedom", and focused as much on that now distant-to-the-Brits concept of free speech, as it did on restoring national pride. And for good reason! The totalitarian descent into censorious darkness in Britain has been as swift as its demographic shift.

Well, if that doesn't speak volumes as to DHH's values, I don't know what does.

Having access revoked with no heads up is a slight. You’re goddamned right they feel slighted. They were slighted.

“Feel slighted” is like “I’m sorry you’re upset”. You put everything on the aggrieved party when you say it like that.

^ This was a personal attack.

In the linked post the author claims to be just some grateful Ruby developer volunteering their time to mundane bookkeeping tasks for an organisation they feel lead to support, describing themselves with:

-----------------------------------------------------------------

When I first discovered Ruby, watching some crazy video where a blog was built in just a few minutes, I was just a young man working at a bank who would sometimes get paid to build software for other people on the side. Ruby opened my eyes to the idea that code could be a craft, a skill I could hone and develop. It also introduced me to the idea that code could be poetry... code could be art.

20 years later, and here I am, a reasonably successful person who's built a career out of building software.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Yet the Ruby Central website describe them like this:

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Freedom Dumlao is a seasoned technology executive with experience at leading companies like Vestmark, Flexcar, Zipcar, Wayfair, and Amazon. Currently the CTO of Vestmark, Freedom brings strategic insights that will help drive Ruby Central’s efforts to expand the Ruby ecosystem and build stronger connections with top companies and startups.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

The post appears to be signed as "MINASWAN", a well know pseudonym for Yukihiro Matsumoto, the chief designer of the Ruby programming language. Hard to imagine a scenario where that was accidental and not an attempt to manipulate readers into assuming Yukihiro has something to do with writing the post.

It's posted to a Substack launched 1 day ago. With the username/subdomain "apiguy" - suspiciously not 'ctoguy' or 'seasonedtechnologyguy'.

I place pretty close to zero respect for the OPs position, compared to well known names in the decade long Ruby Gems committer community.

From https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN

> Initialism of Matz is nice and so we are nice: a motto of the Ruby programming language community, in reference to the demeanor of Yukihiro Matsumoto (nicknamed Matz) [...].

2. Click News.

3. It’s the top item.

Direct link: https://rubycentral.org/news/strengthening-the-stewardship-o...

This post is full of outright nonsense. I was in Central London last Saturday and watched a lot of it go down, before heading to Islington and then catching the last dregs of the crowd nearer Euston and chatting in the pub with some of them.

As a "native Brit" and "native Londoner" that DHH wouldn't recognise as such, he can absolutely do one.

No, reasonable people would not have accepted "we're unilaterally deciding to lock you out with no advance notice, over something we could and should have been discussing for many months or years, but instead screwed up so badly that we're doing it ten minutes from now".

Were independent inquiries also repeating weaponised tropes from long since discredited reports?

“By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-...

The reason might seem odd. But it ocurred to me that if you want to use immigration to reduce crime, including rape, the obvious solution is to ban all male immigration.

That shocked me because it seems so wildly discriminatory. Yes, most violent crimes are committed by men. But very few men commit violent crimes. Banning male immigration would punish a large group for the appalling actions of a few. Making it about "$some_country's men" doesn't seem a whole lot better. It's still unjust to punish someone for someone else's crime.

If anyone is curious about the exercise, I recommend trying it. It was disconcerting to sit with the idea of banning male immigration, really seriously consider it and realise how viscerally shocked I was by the idea.

Edit: for context, in the UK right now, phrases like "rape gangs" are part of the debate/argument about immigration.

Is that it?

There's nothing racist about the facts. How one responds to it can indeed be racist -- ie. "all people of one of said nationalities are like these ones" would be racist. But observing that a nationality of immigrants are vastly overrepresented is just using your eyes to observe reality.

But my point was that I am absolutely sure the majority of Norwegians _want Norway to remain a country that retains its cultural history_ while not being exclusive to one ethnic group. It's about retaining a majority.

I don't understand why that sentiment is so problematic here on HN, because simultaneously people are clamoring for a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.

Why can't Norway have a Norwegian state for the Norwegian people? Or Denmark? Or the UK?

> There are really a lot of us Danes who believed that when people came to this ‘world’s best country’ and were given such good opportunities, they would integrate. They would become Danish, and they would never, ever harm our society. All of us who thought that way have been wrong.

That's objectively observed reality in Denmark. And in Scandinavia in general. It's not about race, it's not about skin color, it's about cultural heritage and values.

All we're saying is that to retain a country's cultural heritage and carry it -- and obviously shape it -- into the future, you have to retain a majority of that heritage, and integrate newcomers. Otherwise it's no longer Denmark.

He is going to be ultra surprised to learn what the majority thinks and how it's not what he thinks it is.

Disallowing someone from immigrating is not a punishment because there is no right to immigration anyway. In fact I believe we should go even further and see immigrants as investments. If the immigrant is unlikely to have a net positive tax contribution (or at least not being a rapist, for a more realistic target), I don't see any reason to allow him or her to be here. If you accept this idea, there is nothing wrong with training a neural network on characteristics of existing immigrants to predict the future value of a particular potential immigrant.

If it's cultural (religion, music/sports related subcultures and codes) then it's chosen. Nobody can force you into a subculture in the West. As soon as you turn 18 you can essentially do what you want, most likely even way before that.

You can chose your subculture, how you dress, style your hair, talk and are read by the mainstream society. Actual racists go by skin color and ignore your cultural choices, fuck them.

The ultimate problems lie in the police: they are generally terrible at handling rape cases, and in this case there are claims that they were actively complicit in some of the rapes.

Using the actions of some members of an ethnic minority to justify .. well, any action against people who were not actually personally involved, is textbook discrimination.

The state of Palestine is an answer to the question of "what nationality do the residents of Gaza and the West Bank have?"

"We want immigrants to integrate" is not the same as "we don't want immigrants", which is the point you're trying to make.

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

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.

Welp, looking forward to the holy wars between people running different influencers' configs five years from now. Who knows, maybe we'll see premium versions of those too.

[0] DistroTube which maintains DTOS, https://distro.tube/dtos/

[1] LunarVim

[2] AstroVim

[3] Doom Emacs

https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

Copenhagen, by comparison, was about eighty-five percent native Danes in 2000, and is still three-quarters today. Enough of a foreign presence to feel cosmopolitan, but still distinctly Danish in all of its ways. Equally statistically evident on streets and bike lanes.

But I think, what would Copenhagen feel like, if only a third of it was Danish, like London? It would feel completely foreign, of course. Alien, even. So I get the frustration that many Brits have with the way mass immigration has changed the culture and makeup of not just London, but their whole country.

you have to retain a majority of that heritage, and integrate newcomers. Otherwise it's no longer Denmark.

what you are asking is not possible without rejecting immigration.

that is the delusion. it is the same all over europe. people expect 100% integration. yet at the same time, prejudices will reject them if they are not completely invisible. that is not possible, and it is not the integration i would want. i have written about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746099

I can't speak for Norway, but in Sweden the only party worth keeping an eye on that adheres to the usual combination of pro-Russia, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-EU rhetoric etc is Sverigedemokraterna (formerly Bevara Sverige Svenskt, a party based solely on the idea of an ethnostate). They're hovering around 20%.

> But my point was that I am absolutely sure the majority of Norwegians _want Norway to remain a country that retains its cultural history_ while not being exclusive to one ethnic group. It's about retaining a majority.

Is the existence of history dependent on the ethnicity of the person reading it? I'm sure you've met non-native people who are in all other respects very much Norwegian.

Unless you mean to imply that culture is constrained to genetics. I deeply hope that that is not what you meant.

> I don't understand why that sentiment is so problematic here on HN, because simultaneously people are clamoring for a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.

How many Norwegian cities were leveled by bombs this year? How many were murdered by foreign military?

> Why can't Norway have a Norwegian state for the Norwegian people? Or Denmark? Or the UK?

They do. Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK

All fully functioning sovereign states, all internationally recognized by their peers and enemies alike.

However this argument is usually used to imply "there should be no limits", and that's obviously not practical nor ethical for anyone involved.

When someone lives this far into an alternate relatity it leaves basically no room for discussion. The amount of work that has to be done just to get everyone back to some relative place of sanity is damn near insurmountable. It leaves no time or energy left to have an actual discussion.

Until now I thought his craziest idea was that dynamic typing is better than static typing. (Just a joke, not trying to start a war over dynamic vs static lol)

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.

germany has 200.000 open positions in IT right now. what would happen if we invited 200.000 experienced IT people from india? half the people without a job would complain that the indians are taking away their jobs. and lots of people would rant about how all these indians change our culture.

and what about the civil war in syria that produced 5 million refugees leaving the country? or ukraine, another 5.7 million refugees?

do you want to reject them just because you feel they threaten your culture?

since you claim that not having a limit is not ethical, let me quote the german chancellor merkel at the time: "The fundamental right to asylum for the politically persecuted knows no upper limit; that also goes for refugees who come to us from the hell of a civil war."

when merkel said "everyone is welcome" this was literally the first time in my life that i was proud of germany. and you should know that in germany being proud of germany is a politically very sensitive statement usually associated with extreme-right groups.

so when it comes to refugees there can't be an upper limit.and beyond that, the limit depends on the economic situation. if we need the workers, the limit goes up. it has to. culture doesn't factor into it at all. you can't have it both ways.

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.

Using your personal brand to espouse the values of ethnonationalism fundamentally serves the capital class wishing to divide and exploit social order among those who labor. This is so rich, coming from the guy who literally created a tool that increases the value of labor.

So, if I had to guess, the smart, critical thinkers in the _global_ Ruby community might find this whole situation reeks.

If I were an immigrant to the UK and a Rails developer, and DHH is getting re-platformed while saying crazy stuff like this, I would think twice about my career choices going forward — Or, push the Ruby community not to stand with a garbage attitude like this, even if from a BDFL-type personality. I _invested_ my life into promoting the use of your tool, while you disparage me based on skin color and country of origin for the sake of some 'ye olde country' vibefest?

Does DHH even know where his principles lie?

This is how your point reads like: Just cosplay as a white european christian, and if you still experience racism... well fuck those racists.

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 foreign culture and not doing enough to befriend these people. as i linked in my other post, i wrote about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746099 we are not letting these people integrate in a way that allows them to keep some of their culture while giving them an opportunity to learn about our culture.

yes, the current reality may be rough. but those are growing pains. and they are consequences of war, and not consequences of allowing to many people to enter the country. by sharing the consequences of these wars germany becomes an ally to the victims, and that is a good thing. rejecting refugees would have turned germany into a villain and an ally of the perpetrators. i'd be ashamed if that happened.

But yeah I agree. Given the opportunity I'm almost always going to go for a statically typed language.

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.

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.

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.

then i visited asia, and i was shocked how much more friendly and welcoming people are there. if you haven't been there it is unimaginable. same goes for africa. seriously. on a global scale, europeans are the worst in being welcoming. so, yes. germans are not welcoming enough. they are principled however, and it is those principles that made them invite those refugees.

the state of germany is not deteriorating because of empathy, but because of the unwillingness of some people to adapt and adjust to the new reality. this lack of adaption leads to confrontation, and that confrontation is the cause of any deterioration. the culture is not destroyed by immigrants. it is destroyed by lack of tolerance and unreasonable expectations.

Nah it's the worst part about Ruby.

Also, naturally I ended up at zero points on that post lol. That wrecked someone's day.