* DHH said some things on his blog that some people believe to be deeply racist / fascist (not going to unpack whether they were or not because answering that question is irrelevant to the fact pattern; consult other threads for that debate).
* A Ruby conference run by Ruby Central was asked to deplatform him. Since he's the creator of Rails, they declined.
* In response to their decision, a major sponsor (Sidekiq) pulled out of supporting the conference and Ruby Central in general, to the tune of $250k a year.
* This created a "blood in the water" situation where Shopify hit Ruby Central with an ultimatum: they would back-fill the lost sponsorship for oversight control of Ruby Central (and the gem repository they maintain, rubygems.org). And if Ruby Central didn't take the deal, Shopify was going to pull their funding also, leaving them in dire straits (this, BTW, is a fairly common corporate tactic when multiple partners share support of a service that doesn't independently generate revenue. Look for it in your own business, startup company, and nonprofit dealings!).
* Shopify now de-facto controls rubygems.org and people immediately started backing towards the exits because corporate takeover tends to be a harbinger of enshittification. As if to prove the point, Shopify's folks immediately ham-fisted the access controls, yanking several gem creators from the admin roles of the gems they created. They claim this was a mistake; several in the community do not want to give them a benefit of the doubt they are not believed to have earned.
* Community members are standing up gem.coop as an alternative gem repository.
At this point, it's probable that any attempt to just list the pertinent events isn't going to end up being as neutral as one might hope because even the choice of what context to include or exclude is itself editorial. This is the same lesson people might learn in a high school history class, just applied to something much more recent.
Perfect neutrality is unachievable but that doesn't mean that every possible way of presenting the facts is equally valid, or even that it's impossible to distinguish presentations that are or aren't missing important context (see, e.g., the surprising success of Twitter's Community Notes).
You’re likely aware, though it’s worth mentioning, that the new owners ousted all existing maintainers without any explanation[1]. This follows a prior incident where access was revoked and later restored, with assurances that it was a mistake. This situation can only be viewed as a malicious attack, in which only the new owners had a full understanding of what transpired. Changing the password was a reasonable and appropriate response that any competent person in a similar position would've considered.
I’m shocked that we seem to be experiencing a Freenode 2.0 situation, but with some supporting the usurpers instead of the longstanding maintainers. It’s only been four years since the Freenode debacle, yet certain types of people seem to have grown bolder since then. A "win" for freedom of expression, huh?
> When they finally did reply, they seem to have developed some sort of theory that I was interested in “access to PII”, which is entirely false. I have no interest in any PII, commercially or otherwise. As my private email published by Ruby Central demonstrates, my entire proposal was based solely on company-level information, with no information about individuals included in any way. Here’s their response, over three days later.
https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/09/the-rubygems-security-inci...
I'm only going by the corporate narrative structure of the director's post, who clearly wants to throw someone under the bus and cover up organizational incompetence. "Open" source has become so despicable.
"As this situation occurred, I was the primary on-call. My contractual, paid responsibility to Ruby Central was to defend the RubyGems.org service against potential threats."
For instance, DHH and his fancy blog, are not 100% related or relatable to RubyCentral ousting long-term developers. There may be some connection (DHH on shopify's board, tons of ruby developers being paid by shopify and still writing "my opinion is totally unbiased" like byroot did), but there is no 1:1 overlap. For instance, I could not care what DHH writes on his blog any less. rubygems.org changing policies though - that affects me. And if shopify is in part responsible, and DHH sits on shopify and makes decisions, then yes, something changed here. But there are also people who have a vendetta against DHH and they leak into other spaces too. I am not among those people and they shouldn't try to hijack other communities either.
By the way, the Shopify ultimatum also does not explain why all other ruby devs were ousted. Ruby Central lost the narrative here. And, since they accuse Arko as the ultimate bad boy - why haven't they sued him? Why do they continue to refuse to do so? (Because they know their case would be rubbish nonsense and they would have to open up ALL emails, which may make many more people suddenly ... very funky.)
As someone who has sued someone else and won, it can take months for your legal team to gather the facts, decide on strategy, and then file suit.
It's related because it led to Sidekiq dropping their funding, which increased shopify's power over ruby central.
* DHH is not only considered racist / fascist due to some blog posts, but also for making Hyprland the default DE in Omarchy, developed by someone who goes by the name Vaxry Vaxerski, who is also considered fascist and racist, and thus banned from contributing to freedesktop projects due to supposed breach of CoC:
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat
* Hyprland and all its contributors are now also considered fascist from taking sponsorship money from 37signals, DHH's company, due to it being an important part of Omarchy.
https://account.hypr.land/sponsors
* Due to the fact that both DHH and Vaxry are both considered fascist / racist, Framework and its CEO (yes, that Framework) are now considered to be supporters of fascism, because Framework is sponsoring and supporting both Omarchy and Hyprland.
https://account.hypr.land/sponsors
* Cloudflare (yes, that Cloudflare) is considered to support fascism because they support Omarchy and the Ladybird webbrowser (which is a project also run by someone considered to be a fascist)
https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-future-of-the-ope...
* Last but not least, Tobi (Shopify CEO) and thus Shopify are also considered by many to be supporters of fascism when this drama started to unroll for standing by DHH no matter what when activists wanted to deplatform and ban DHH from his own creation (Ruby on Rails). Which makes the Ruby Central drama due to the involvement of Shopify even more interesting:
https://xcancel.com/tobi/status/1970944464303923687
Me? I want to hop in a time machine back to the 90s/early 00s before all this crap started and everybody was just generally nice to each other.
The internet was never nice. It, however, did at one time require technical savvy to use. With that savvy came the understanding that computers and people aren't the same thing, so when the computer emitted something not nice you'd laughed at how quant the technology was instead of getting your emotions all tied up in a knot and try to hold a person accountable like those who have no idea about what's going on around them do.
We tried "Don't feed the trolls." It's how we got where we are now.
We may just be working under different definitions. Are you claiming that when I type things into, say, Hacker News and hit reply, the words you read aren't the words I wrote?
Or are you asserting the "person" of the words in the computer is not the same person I am behind the keyboard?
I'd argue that the latter is the disproven hypothesis. It turns out people who said awful things online were actually awful people; they may not show it as often in public, but they weren't different human beings. Broadly speaking, they believed the things they said and tended to act on them in real life.
Laughing off things on the computer as not real was how at least one shooting went unchecked.
This methodology is definitely not how you discover fascism. But it is how fascists and communists defined and traced their enemies in the 20th century.
While I am all for making conscious choices on what to support I can't take anything phrased like that seriously "all is contributors".
Hyprland, while inferior (imo) in some aspects to sway on the wayland tiling manager landscape is a fine piece of software that I use on my non-work computer (I still use sway for stability).
Back on the topic: I reiterate I'd be happy to avoid using or supporting projects based on non-purely technical issues (discussion on "pure technicality" omitted for brevity).
It's just... What, do I need to know every persons imo completely irrelevant opinions on whatever du jour hot political topic? Maybe the answer could be yes,
I would be fine with dropping Hyprland support, maybe I will after digging a bit more. But this whole thing just reeks to me of terminally informed and ragebaited people looking for a platform to vomit their completely irrelevant opinions, actions speak more (e.g. fostering a dangerous environment _adjacent to the project_ based on discrimination).
I just feel I want to nope out of this industry and everything related to it, it's very overwhelming.
No. But if they're using their social capital they've built via their software contributions (like DHH) to spread racist nonsense, then maybe it's worth considering alternatives, or at the very least, stop supporting those projects.
"should keep their bullshit to themselves" <---> "should perhaps take leadership and avoid having their public channel a cesspool" <---> "actively encourages/participates in discriminatory practices" <---> "raging maniac hurting people, rallying for X"
Specifically on the topic of RubyGems:
I couldn't care less about what DHH posts or not, I certainly care that he uses his position to influence a chain of actors to interfere with something that always worked just because X.
I couldn't care less about the other side on the "cancel" mission, I care about influencing a chain of actors to interfere with something that always worked just because Y.
Please quarantine your political polarization/culture wars bullshit, non-anglo countries don't need it.
People need to step back and breathe. It’s possible to feel one thing about a (frankly shite) blog post and its author without tarring everybody within six degrees of separation with the same brush, and it’s quite unsettling that people find such nuance so difficult.
> Ladybird webbrowser (which is a project also run by someone considered to be a fascist)
Do you mean awesomekling? Why is he considered a fascist?
There are definitely actual fascists in tech (like Curtis Yarvin) which I (centrist liberal, not a tankie) fully support deplatforming where possible, but why are they considered fascists?
I hope you can see this because my posts in this thread are getting attacked and downvoted.
This pretty much summarizes how it started (copied from Google):
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5823666/ladybird-web-browser...
(note that while the exact word never is seen in evidence added to this post but it sure is or hinted towards elsewhere.)
and evidenced by this its ongoing:
https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1971287738268909576
because some people disagree with things like this:
https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1966456391146606806
And there are tons more posts that show that some people are not exactly nice towards him on his X timeline.
Also there's direct proof of these accusations out there but I will not link to those out of professional courtesy for those involved (yes, some people still have that).
It should also be noted Lunduke is also not neutral and has his own political agenda.
You are alleging that Shopify was retaliating. Do you have any reliable context that Shopify was acting in a retaliatory manner?
Given the power dynamics, the burden of proof is on Shopify to proove it wasn't retaliating at the behest of, or in a misguided attempt to defend DHH's honor.
Per the concept of "innocent until proven guilty", there is no burden on Shopify to prove they didn't do what you believe. The burden is on you to provide evidence for the motivations behind their actions.
I personally doubt Tobi got Shopify to where it was by making rash decisions based on emotions and drama.
Your second para is appeal to authority. A former CEO of mine (not a billionaire though, but a mere centimillionaire) was a drama magnet, thin-skinned, and a vengeful little shit.
I have seen the "soft-hostile takeover" executed in other contexts, however. I don't think it's necessary to presume DHH used his influence as a Shopify board member to seal the deal or that he would have ulterior motive in doing so; in my experience, it's sufficient for a company to see a valuable piece of a puzzle they care about go vulnerable to acquisition offers to make the offer (with the corresponding stick). I'm willing to be convinced otherwise in either direction if more information presents itself; all I know is that Shopify put the offer on the table "We'll back-fill your funding gap or we'll make it much worse; your call." And I've seen that offer made in a completely capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-claw "business is business" way in the past.