The Rubygems.org Takeover

Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago

chmaynard

57 points

23 comments

lwn.netTechstory

heatednegative

Debate

80/100

RubygemsRuby EcosystemOpen-Source Governance

Key topics

Rubygems

Ruby Ecosystem

Open-Source Governance

The article discusses the controversy surrounding the takeover of Rubygems.org, sparking debate in the HN community about the implications for the Ruby ecosystem and the role of key figures like DHH and Shopify.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Moderate engagement

First comment

Peak period

1-2h

Avg / period

3.5

Comment distribution14 data points

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Based on 14 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Oct 20, 2025 at 9:02 PM EDT
2 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Oct 20, 2025 at 10:08 PM EDT
1h after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
9 comments in 1-2h
Hottest window of the conversation
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04Latest activity
Oct 21, 2025 at 9:49 AM EDT
2 months ago
Step 04

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Discussion (23 comments)

Showing 14 comments of 23

PaulHoule

2 months ago

2 replies

Isn't this the reason why there's been such an uptick of talk about DHH lately?

jmcgough

2 months ago

2 replies

Related, but not the reason for it. DHH has been posting increasingly racist blogs.

PaulHoule

2 months ago

1 reply

Not sure if I really believe that.

The politics have been smouldering on forever. That governance event w/ Rubygems seems like a once in every twenty years kind of event. Unfortunately racist blog posts are like one every five seconds, you're kinda platforming somebody by trying to deplatform them for that. Like it or not 34% of people in the UK said they would vote for Reform

https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/reform-uk-leads-12-pts-over-labo...

and you can't change that by finger wagging at those people, drop what you are doing and watch this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b46LtbbZ5JE

... but it's too hard to have a war with the UK so you gotta fight some washed up rando.

ryandv

2 months ago

People are coming to the realization that Ruby is a fundamentally insecure language. I've given my reasoning for this, though with respect to a discussion on static analysis, here [0]. Ruby, Rails, the library ecosystem, and the entire language, are actually one giant monolith, in that any one package, or really anybody with access to the runtime, can modify and monkey patch any other package. This is not a glaring security flaw at all, but rather a result of how "awesome" Ruby is in letting you make "Extensions to All Objects," [1] including core data types such as String, Array, Hash, and Integer.

Point the second: People are feeling emboldened to bypass rule of law and take matters into their own hands, up to and including taking other peoples' lives. Not only is this time fraught with political tension, it is also approaching the most crucial time of the year for ecommerce and online retailers - the holiday shopping season.

Put two and two together and it's not hard to see why people are scrambling to secure the software supply chain.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45104910

[1] https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_support_core_extension...

derkster

2 months ago

i checked. he seemingly limits his "i have a controversial opinion, let me explain why everyone who disagrees is disgusting" posts to once a month. i'm not sure they're increasing racist, but he's clearly becoming more and more enraged.

anyone so unhinged that they can't comprehend the value in not publicly attacking subsets of the population you might need to cooperate with, eventually becomes a liability for everyone.

joshmn

2 months ago

DHH stirred an uproar because of his political opinions. He had a post on his blog around the same time of the Rubygems drama; the community was already had heightened anxiety.

deedubaya

2 months ago

1 reply

All of this sucks, and it’s time for the community to move on.

It’s a bad look for the ruby ecosystem. Continuing to rehash, throw mud, and speculate at this point likely harms the greater community more than any “side” would “win”.

hshdhdhehd

2 months ago

1 reply

It would have been a better angle to title it "gem.coop - the new homebrew-like place to get your gems" and then talk of the advantages for users and the simplicity of the file change to use it.

baggy_trough

2 months ago

Maybe there will be later, but for now, there are no advantages for users (probably stability disadvantages) except political alignment.

yencabulator

2 months ago

1 reply

> Many people have also taken note of the fact that Hansson joined the Shopify board of directors last year.

> "Shopify specifically put immense financial pressure on Ruby Central to take full control of the RubyGems GitHub organisation and Ruby gems"

Well that explains everything.

sam_lowry_

2 months ago

I may be utterly wrong, but this is what I think has happened:

This post triggered the an attempt to cancel DHH: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

DHH races sports cars with Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke. These two plus some pro-Israel and anti-immigration pals pushed out all the cancel culture guys that already tried to cancel DHH in 2022 after his no-politics fiasco at Basecamp.

That's how RubyGems landed in the hands of the only impartial arbiter Matz.

ChrisArchitect

2 months ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45615863

And so much discussion at every step of the way

mattmcknight

2 months ago

It seems like things have ended up in a better place than they started.

sgentle

2 months ago

To quote DHH: "when much of the media reports a story like this, it's often without citing the specific words in question"

I think you lose a lot when you abstract away someone's words as "positions that alienate". Pineapple on pizza is a position that alienates, as is forced sterilisation of criminals. So here's some specific words:

> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits [ie white, as specified by the Wikipedia article the words "native Brits" link to]

> There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.

He doesn't think brown people belong in the UK. His "positions" are racism. He's racist. That's the problem.

Where have all the enlightenment-values rationalist monks gone now that we so desperately need people to combine P and P -> Q?

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