A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

This is a reasonable perspective but leaves a lot of unanswered questions and creates more questions. Who is the funder threatening to pull funding and why were they not more collaborative or flexible with Ruby Central? Did they know that this is how their request would be handled?

How much information and what information did Board members have when making their votes?

One thing that hasn’t been addressed is who was responsible for communications and implementation of this. It says here that the Director of Open Source did what the Board asked of him. Outside of the Board, which as stated here were heads down and trying to problem solve, Ruby Central’s website also shows a staff of several non-technical employees. Prominently, there is an Executive Director with a background in communications and non profit work per their LinkedIn. Where was this Executive Director and the other staff members during this? Were they involved with decision making and communication around this? How involved was the Board of Directors in implementation after the decision was made? It is a hollow statement to say they are just technical people trying to problem solve when there appears to be a whole team of non-technical staff members and an executive specializing in communications. Something clearly went wrong here and there are a lot of missing pieces around what happened after the vote took place. Most of this could have been mitigated with standard processes and simply communicating to maintainers and the community.

I don’t know why the funder matters. RC agreed to a contract that provided a fixed date by which these issues needed to be resolved or funding would be terminated. Exploding terms are rare in funding agreements because they don’t make the funder look good when they explode. Back in my non profit board days, I learned that contracts with exploding terms need to go in front of the entire board instantly for action or lawyers will get paid.

Actions were taken, at the request of a major funder or group of funders, that have become a PR problem for the entire Ruby language. This is the third article I’ve seen on HN in the last week and it’s not just Rubyists commenting. This is damaging to everyone who uses Ruby and developers who want job security in the future. These funders should want to maintain the reputation of Ruby, and forcing a nonprofit to take an extreme action like this in a pressure cooker situation puts all of Ruby at risk when it explodes into a scandal. These companies need to work transparently in the best interest of the whole community.