There is a lot of tension that the report seeks to either minimize or avoid. It’s also just really hard to express it in a report like this because there’s no real place for it if the goal is to look professional.

I think the RubyGems fiasco was a result of unresolved tensions. People chose not to be adults about and resolve the issues respectfully. IMHO, I think one of the main problems is that nobody was willing to spin up a core foundation to own critical infrastructure to the Ruby community which remains a problem.

I cannot find the blogposts I remember reading, but recall that there were some bad feelings about Ruby Together and Arko’s leadership of it before it was merged with Ruby Central. It appears these feelings never went away which is made very clear by the way that key Shopify engineers started posting after Ruby Central took over the RubyGems GitHub org [1].

Now combine this with dhh’s right-wing political posts and behavior, his extremely close relationship with the founder of Shopify (dhh is on the board of Shopify), a key Ruby Central donor pulling critical funding because he did not want his money going towards giving dhh more attention and you’re left with Ruby Central effectively being controlled by Shopify (which, as far as I can tell is still the situation) because that’s where all of its funding comes from now.

Frankly, the biggest thing this entire fiasco has shown me is that a lot of us are still a bunch of idiotic teenagers. Integrity and maturity is in short supply where it is needed the most.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/rmfranca.bsky.social/post/3lz7alpob...