A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

Locking out a guy like David Rodriguez (the main person I see doing bundler commits) in a dramatic fashion just seems like absolute craziness. I can't fathom doing it without a very good reason, which has yet to be revealed if it exists.

Does “lest we lose critical funding because we don’t have proper agreements with our committers” not cut it as a reason for you? Genuinely curious, it seems like a reasonable explanation assuming it’s true.

It does not, for me.

Given that access was cut, then restored, then cut again, then days, then someone finally says "hey were were going to lose critical funding" makes it seem like a post-facto excuse for a hostile takeover.

And the whole "oh, well, we're bad at comms" makes it sound even worse!

Which is the whole crux of the issue. At no point in any of this did Ruby Central do anything reasonable. The they tried to explain that their unreasonable actions were reasonable, if you only knew the things they knew, which they were for some reason unable to tell people until just now.

Could it be true? Sure, absolutely.

Does it seem reasonable at the moment? Hell no.

From TFA:

> Let's get some kind of committer agreement in place with those folks who need access (the same way many other high profile open source projects have), and remove access from those who don't, while still being fully open to accepting PRs and being open to re-welcoming them as committers if they decide that is how they want to spend their time in the future.

> Here's the challenge. 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?

deivid-rodriguez's last commits were Sept 18: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits/master/?since=2...

With 7873 commits since 2018 he's 2x over the second one and crushingly the most active contributor since then: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/graphs/contributors

However you slice it, none of that fits into TFA's above narrative.

His access being revoked can only be described as complete bonkers.

Ruby Central sponsors him to work on the project. They also own the project. Sure it’s not ideal that they’ve apparently come to an impasse of some sort but locking him out is not bonkers.