Bundler belongs to the Ruby community
I’ve spent 15 years of my life working on Bundler. When I introduce myself, people say “oh, the Bundler guy?”, and I am forced to agree.
I didn’t come up with the original idea for Bundler (that was Yehuda). I also didn’t work on the first six months worth of prototypes. That was all Carl and Yehuda together, back when “Carlhuda” was a super-prolific author of Ruby libraries, including most of the work to modularize Rails for version 3.
I joined the team at a pivotal moment, in February 2010, as the 0.9 prototype was starting to be re-written yet another time into the shape that would finally be released as 1.0. By the time Carl, Yehuda, and I released version 1.0 together in August 2010, we had fully established the structure and commands that Bundler 2.7.2 still uses today.
I gave my first conference talk about Bundler at Red Dirt Ruby in May 2010. Because they would be too busy with Rails 3 talks, Yehuda and Carl asked me to give the first RailsConf talk about Bundler, in June 2010.
As Carl and Yehuda drifted off to other projects, in 2011 and 2012 respectively, I took on a larger role, co-maintaining the project with Terence Lee, then on the Ruby platform team at Heroku. We shipped (and, embarrassingly, broke) many versions of Bundler on our way to the 1.1 release and its major speed improvements. We also gave several conference talks together, sharing what we had learned about Bundler, about gems, and about maintaining open source.
In 2013, I managed to convince the owner of bundler.io to sell me his domain, and rebuilt the website to host a separate copy of the documentation for every version of Bundler, ensuring even users on old versions could still access accurate documentation.
By the end of 2013, Terence had drifted away from the project as well, and I realized that everyone using Ruby was now one bus (or one lottery ticket) away from Bundler having no significant maintainers. During 2014, I made sure to settle any remaining ownership issues, including purchasing the rights to the Bundler logo, and began investigating various funding ideas. I tried specialized consulting, corporate sponsorships, and asking Ruby Central about sponsoring Bundler and RubyGems development work. Ruby Central declined, citing their desire to stay focused on conferences, but suggested that if I wanted to pursue something myself they would be happy to collaborate.
In 2015, I founded Ruby Together specifically to raise funds to pay the existing maintainers team of Bundler, RubyGems, and RubyGems.org. Over time, we were able to raise enough money to quietly but scrappily keep the entire RubyGems ecosystem maintained and functional. Ruby Together did not ever, at any point, demand any form of governance or control over the existing open source projects. Maintainers did their thing in the RubyGems and Bundler GitHub orgs, while Ruby Together staff and board members did their thing in the rubytogether GitHub org.
By 2021, when Ruby Central and Ruby Together were both interested in merging together, funds were harder to find. Ruby Together had a membership program. Ruby Central wanted a to have a membership program. The confusing split between “Ruby Central owns the AWS account, but Ruby Together pays all the devs” continued to be a problem.
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