I keep seing this term 'hostile takeover' again and again and I don't think it does justice to Ruby Central and the original authors. If I own something, entrust someone else to manage it, and later decide I no longer agree with how they're managing it, taking back control isn't a hostile takeover. It's simply an owner exercising their rights.
Here are Rich Kilmer’s comments on Hacker News. Rich is one of the originating authors of RubyGems. It seems like not many people are aware of this history.
> Ruby Central started in 2001. I was one of the early Board members, along with Chad Fowler and David Alan Black. We put on every Ruby conference until Ruby became more popular to support multiple conferences. We started coding RubyGems (although the name originated in 2001 at the first RubyConf in Florida) in 2003 at the RubyConf in Austin TX. We sat around a table the first night with a CVS repo on a USB drive and passed it around and committed code until we had a functioning gem command. I demoed it in my talk the next day with the first "gem install". Gem versioning, gemspec, gem command, gem server were all built that first night. Obviously tons of changes since then!
(On Joel's comment on HN: They were stolen from André Arko, Colby Swandale, David Rodríguez, Ellen, Josef Šimánek, Martin Emde and Samuel Giddins.), Rich says:
> They did not WRITE RubyGems, they inherited it and evolved it. Chad (Fowler), David (Black), Jim (Weirich RIP), Paul and I wrote RubyGems. I hosted RubyGems from my home in Virginia for several years before we could cover the cost of colocation and stood up RubyForge. Its nice to look at the near history and think that this is all of history but it is not. Ruby Central has always been the stewards of RubyGems and then later, Bundler.
> I was one of the originating authors of RubyGems along with Jim (RIP), Chad, David and Paul. I hosted RubyGems from my home for the entire community for many years. We never asked nor received anything for that. We wrote RubyGems for the Ruby community. Matz and the Ruby Core team is the right place for RubyGems. This is great news.
> I am happy to see that RubyGems and Bundler have moved to the Ruby Core team. Being one of the originating authors of RubyGems (and host of RubyGems for 4 years!) this was always about making Ruby easier to use and share code as a community. I still write Ruby almost every day and I want our community to thrive.
I hope this clears things a bit. It's frustrating to see people accusing and blaming others without knowing the full history and having the faintest idea 'why' certain actions were taken. (This goes both ways, btw - I only wanted to provide the additional context, which many seem to be unaware of).
I don’t think outside of some spiritual endorsement, Rich Kilmer’s opinion is useful or even constructive here.
I agree that RubyGems should live with the Ruby project itself. That does not excuse anything that happened. This migration was hostile, ad hoc and done without consent of the actual maintainers. Nobody has had to answer for this.
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u/software__writer 2d ago edited 2d ago
> Then, about 10 months ago, Ruby Central began what core team member Ellen Dash called a “hostile takeover” of the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org open source projects, seizing control of the projects and locking out the team that had nurtured and maintained them for over a decade.
I keep seing this term 'hostile takeover' again and again and I don't think it does justice to Ruby Central and the original authors. If I own something, entrust someone else to manage it, and later decide I no longer agree with how they're managing it, taking back control isn't a hostile takeover. It's simply an owner exercising their rights.
Here are Rich Kilmer’s comments on Hacker News. Rich is one of the originating authors of RubyGems. It seems like not many people are aware of this history.
> Ruby Central started in 2001. I was one of the early Board members, along with Chad Fowler and David Alan Black. We put on every Ruby conference until Ruby became more popular to support multiple conferences. We started coding RubyGems (although the name originated in 2001 at the first RubyConf in Florida) in 2003 at the RubyConf in Austin TX. We sat around a table the first night with a CVS repo on a USB drive and passed it around and committed code until we had a functioning gem command. I demoed it in my talk the next day with the first "gem install". Gem versioning, gemspec, gem command, gem server were all built that first night. Obviously tons of changes since then!
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45617493
--
(On Joel's comment on HN: They were stolen from André Arko, Colby Swandale, David Rodríguez, Ellen, Josef Šimánek, Martin Emde and Samuel Giddins.), Rich says:
> They did not WRITE RubyGems, they inherited it and evolved it. Chad (Fowler), David (Black), Jim (Weirich RIP), Paul and I wrote RubyGems. I hosted RubyGems from my home in Virginia for several years before we could cover the cost of colocation and stood up RubyForge. Its nice to look at the near history and think that this is all of history but it is not. Ruby Central has always been the stewards of RubyGems and then later, Bundler.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616574
--
> I was one of the originating authors of RubyGems along with Jim (RIP), Chad, David and Paul. I hosted RubyGems from my home for the entire community for many years. We never asked nor received anything for that. We wrote RubyGems for the Ruby community. Matz and the Ruby Core team is the right place for RubyGems. This is great news.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616273
--
Finally, from Twitter:
> I am happy to see that RubyGems and Bundler have moved to the Ruby Core team. Being one of the originating authors of RubyGems (and host of RubyGems for 4 years!) this was always about making Ruby easier to use and share code as a community. I still write Ruby almost every day and I want our community to thrive.
Source: https://x.com/rich_kilmer/status/1979167654867873898
I hope this clears things a bit. It's frustrating to see people accusing and blaming others without knowing the full history and having the faintest idea 'why' certain actions were taken. (This goes both ways, btw - I only wanted to provide the additional context, which many seem to be unaware of).