Sunday, Sep 28, 2025
Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco
We are in the midst of a Ruby drama for the ages. I'm sure a bunch of people figured we were all too old for this shit, but apparently we are not.
This debate has been eating at me ever since the news first broke, but I've tried to keep the peace by staying out of it. Unlike most discourse about what's going on, my discomfort stems less from the issue at hand—what Ruby Central did, how they did it, and how poorly it was communicated—and more to do with how one-sided the public discussion has been. Beneath the surface of this story are the consequences of a decade-old conflict that was never fully resolved. Then and now, one side—Andre Arko and many people associated with him—has availed itself of public channels to voice their perspective, while the other—which includes a surprisingly wide swath of well-known Ruby and Rails contributors—has chosen to stay silent.
The losers in this dynamic are the vast majority normal everyday Ruby developers, most of whom are operating on very little information and who understandably feel confused and concerned. People whose livelihood depends on the health of the Ruby ecosystem deserve more information than they're getting, especially now that its operational stability has come under threat. The future of that ecosystem is once again uncertain, but—just like last time—the outcome is being shaped by a history that's been kept from the public, widening the rift between its key decision-makers and the communities they serve.
I don't have the answers to what's going on in 2025. A few details have been shared with me—details that would contradict fact-checks and timelines others have pieced together and published—but I can't pretend to have a clear picture of what actually happened, why no one is setting the record straight, or when we'll have clarity on what the future holds. All I can do is offer a little bit of context to explain why I'm dubious of the dominant narrative that has taken shape online. Namely, I don't believe this is a cut-and-dry case of altruistic open-source maintainers being persecuted by oppressive corporate interests.
After you read this, perhaps your perspective will shift as well.
Before anything else can make sense, it's important to understand how weird the governance of the Ruby ecosystem is. There are three moving parts involved that are ostensibly managed by three different groups, but whose members have such broadly overlapping systems access that it has now led to disputes over who owns what:
If Ruby were invented today, a single party would probably control all three of these things, but it took nearly fifteen years for today's status quo to take shape. Ruby was invented by someone in Japan in the 1990s. RubyGems was created at a conference in Texas by a few Americans in the early 2000s. RubyGems.org only became the de facto canonical host for gems six years later. My impression is that at no point was communication and coordination particularly fluent between the various parties.
Adding to this, Bundler—a meta tool for resolving the correct versions of all of a project's gem dependencies and which quickly became vital to nearly all Ruby application development—was created independently of the above players by Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche. Andre Arko later became the lead maintainer of Bundler, and in 2015 he founded a 501(c)(6) nonprofit called Ruby Together. In 2019, Bundler was folded into RubyGems. In 2022, Ruby Together was absorbed by Ruby Central.
... continue reading