A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

This story is missing any context around what occurred. The only thing I was able to find was by searching, and I came to this PDF statement.

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.

I found this helpful in explaining what's happened: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/22/ruby_central_rubygems...

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.

Thanks - that was helpful indeed. From there, I also found the linked post by Tekin Süleyman ( https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro... ) to be informative.

Wow! When that one DHH blog went around the other day, I didn't actually pay attention to who the author was. All I saw was yet another bigoted rant and just skimmed it and rolled my eyes. (e: here it is to save people the effort: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 )

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.

2025 has been wild but DHH outing himself as a crazy racist was definitely not something I was expecting...

Oh this sort of thing is far from new for DHH, there's long been a desire to oust him from Rails or fork it, but it's never quite came to fruition, and unless Shopify were to back it, it is unlikely it would survive :-\

I guess I wasn't aware since I'm not really involved in the Ruby community. I always knew he was kind of an oddball from a few of his posts I've seen and podcasts I've heard him on. Never would have guessed it was this bad.

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)

To be fair it is an objectively crazy idea that dynamic typing is better than static typing (I'll start the war, it's fine).

Lol. I assumed a Ruby person would prefer dynamic typing and I didn't want to insult you.

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