news
LWN on the Hostile Takeover of RubyGems.org (an Ongoing Coup)
-
LWN ☛ The RubyGems.org takeover
In September, a group of long-time maintainers of Ruby packaging tools projects had their GitHub privileges revoked by nonprofit corporation Ruby Central in what many people are calling a hostile takeover. Ruby Central and its board members have issued several public statements that have, so far, failed to satisfy many in the Ruby community. In response, some of the former contributors to RubyGems are working on an alternative service called gem.coop. On October 17, ownership of the RubyGems and Bundler repositories was handed over to the Ruby core team, even though those projects had never been part of core Ruby previously. The takeover and subsequent events have raised a number of questions in the Ruby community.
Ruby Central is a nonprofit that was formed by David Alan Black and Chad Fowler in 2001 to organize events for the Ruby community. It soon began supporting other initiatives, such as RubyForge, which shut down in 2014, and has helped pay for RubyGems.org hosting since its inception. However, Ruby Central has always been primarily an organization to put on conferences—it has not been actively involved in maintenance or operations until its merger with Ruby Together. The work to maintain and operate RubyGems.org, the Ruby community's hosting service for Ruby gem packages, has been undertaken primarily by volunteers for most of its existence. LWN covered this in more detail in the article "A brief history of RubyGems.org".
-
LWN ☛ A brief history of RubyGems.org
Ruby libraries and applications are distributed via a packaging format called a gem. RubyGems.org has been the central hosting service for gems since about 2010. This article is part one of a two-part series on the RubyGems.org takeover by Ruby Central. Understanding the history of RubyGems.org, and the contributor community behind it, is vital to making sense of the current power struggle between Ruby Central and members of the Ruby community who have maintained those services and tools for many years.