This incident involved many people over a rather long time scale, and it was important to detangle how people perceived events from how they actually unfolded. The subject matter is deeply subjective, and multiple failed attempts at writing this doc came as a result of aiming for objectivity, for blameless representation. Therefore, those named in this report are:

    - Full-time employees of Ruby Central
    - Part-time consultants who were involved in access discussions
    - Anyone who made an access change from September 10th-18th, 2025
    - Those who have already been publicly identified in the discourse

    Volunteer groups, including the Ruby Central Board and the Open Source Software (OSS) Committee, are listed, but their actions are represented as a group. Individual quotes from the OSS Committee are used without direct attribution when they represent a general consensus.


    Some execution failures and mistakes are individual, but the purpose of having a foundation and having an institution is that it can rise above individual limitations and provide robust, fault-tolerant systems. Therefore, these are our mistakes, collectively. And collectively we'll learn from them, but only if we face what happened, what we meant to do, and where we fell short.

    The hope is that by sharing this, we can provide some closure to the community and increase transparency

The undeniable effect of masking specific comments made by OSS committee members is to protect three members (2 current, 1 former) of Shopify's technical leadership around Ruby and Rails, who have all since left the committee. The one who left Shopify went to 37signals after.