As I understand it, Ruby Central controlled the rubygems and bundler github organizations, but did not "own" the projects in the traditional sense - the individual contributers have copyright on the code, and potentially even trademark rights. By then removing access of core maintainers to those projects, they removed access to something they don't "own" themselves.
This is all complicated by the fact that controlling a github organization or repo is different from owning the trademark or copyright. But some of the original maintainers clearly felt they had more of a right to those projects than Ruby Central did.
I believe not clarifying this before making these access changes was the biggest mistake that Ruby Central made, and it's not even mentioned in this report.
The takeaway for the rest of is that separation of such concerns isn’t an abstract notion but needs to be reflected in the mechanical implementation of organisations, lest you get a train wreck later when perspectives don’t align and the whole picture crumbles.
They're not the original authors of Rubygems so it's doubtful they have anything more than copyright on the code they contributed.
By their own admission, André is a contractor to Ruby Central. Contractors, especially under California law, have no contractual obligation of confidentiality to the other party unless there's a pre-existing agreement in place. They later admit in this "incident report" that they didn't have any legal agreements with André in place, so there's no basis for claiming André couldn't work on rv.
Samuel was an employee, not a contractor, but [California Bus. & Prof. Code § 16600](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....) voids non-compete agreements—so even as an employee, he had every right to work on a competing project. There's no indication that he used Ruby Central's proprietary information to do so, and the report doesn't allege that. I have little doubt that if Samuel or André used proprietary information to develop rv, they would have already presented evidence of that.
Independent of the legalese, a "uv but for ruby" is a blindingly obvious thing to do, and Ruby Central doesn't get to lick the cookie and get upset when an independent contractor—Ruby Central's own characterization—does a thing they didn't fund.
My sourcing on this is that I run a 10-person business with employees in California. I'm not a lawyer, but I looked over enough of this paperwork that I feel confident opining on an internet forum.
My biggest takeaway from this is the intermingling of opensource work/foundations/companies and employees/contractors/volunteers needs to be incredibly explicit. It sounds like everyone had very different expectations about what this group of people was (ranging from an exclusive club of influential ruby developers to a very formal, business-like foundation) and, as a result, each other's actions seemed hostile/strange/confusing.
[1] I actually think the comments about the proposal of selling the user data does a disservice to the postmortem. I think it invokes a much more emotional reaction from the reader than anything else and, while potentially interesting, seems like dirty laundry that doesn't change the lesson the postmortem teaches.
I seem to remember there were some threats of legal action related to unauthorized access after this kerfuffle but I a) don't know what is going on with that, b) don't know what the law actually says about that and c) don't know if that is what you are referring to. If so, I think it is different than what the original comment alleged which was more about moonlighting/using proprietary information/competing. I think that topic is extremely complicated (e.g. I am not so sure moonlighting for a competitor while an employee is necessarily protected in California...) but that wasn't alleged in the postmortem anyway.
> The document didn't mention a lawsuit and I was just responding to the above comment with only the context of the postmortem and pointing out that this particular article didn't claim anything illegal happened.
You are correct that they did not make any claims, but the article did insinuate illegal behavior on the part of André and Samuel by selectively juxtaposing facts to imply wrongdoing without ever directly stating or saying that their behavior was illegal. For example:
1. André's first commit on RV is placed on the same bullet point as the Ruby Central-funded maintainer offsite, which implies Ruby Central's travel money subsidized a competing project's creation. 2. The `rubygems-github-backup` access token covering "all repos, including private repos" is introduced in the same timeline section as RV development, without any allegation it was used for RV. 3. The "Incident Lessons" section recommends adding an "Outside Business Activities" declaration policy, which only reads as a "lesson" if André's undisclosed side project is being framed as the problem in need of remediation. 4. The report states André "had intimate knowledge of the foundation roadmap" and "did not tell anyone in Ruby Central about this work until it launched". This frames nondisclosure of a lawful side project as a transgression. However, Ruby Central passed on this work, and even if they didn't, André has no obligation to tell Ruby Central about his work! 5. André's proposal to have his consultancy analyze RubyGems.org download logs is presented alongside an OSS Committee member raising PII and "reputational risk" concerns, casting a perfectly sensible rejected business proposal as something suspect.
By my count, Ruby Central makes roughly 10 insinuations throughout the report, but not once do they actually claim any of these constitute a transgression.
> I think that topic is extremely complicated (e.g. I am not so sure moonlighting for a competitor while an employee is necessarily protected in California...)
California is actually quite clear on this! Bus. & Prof. Code § 16600 voids non-compete agreements, and California courts have consistently read it broadly enough that working on a competing project during employment is protected. The line is whether you used your employer's proprietary information or resources to do it, not whether you competed. The report does not allege that Samuel or André used Ruby Central's proprietary information, and given how thoroughly they documented everything else, I'd expect them to have said so if they had evidence of it. Ruby Central is insinuating that working on RV in the first place is a problem, not that they crossed any legal or contractual line.
> You are correct that they did not make any claims, but the article did insinuate illegal behavior on the part of André and Samuel by selectively juxtaposing facts to imply wrongdoing without ever directly stating or saying that their behavior was illegal.
I think we just took away something very different from the article. I didn't read it that way, I read it more as "these two have already decided to move on to work on this without Ruby Central so it's pragmatic to cut off their access". We might just need to agree to disagree on what the article implies; perhaps we are just reading it with different boundary conditions.
Where we might agree is that repeatedly bringing up the selling user data proposal doesn't add anything to the story except to prejudice the reader against Andre. If it's to show that there was still some communication between Andre and others at Ruby Central, I would have kept it at that. Every time it got mentioned I winced.
> California is actually quite clear on this!
My understanding is quite different. There is a duty of loyalty an employee owes their employer and directly competing with your employer is clearly a breach. There is recent enough case law on this (at least covering terminating an employee for cause as a result). I don't have access to the materials from a previous employer that explained some of this but I did quickly find [1] which roughly agrees with my recollection (though I would not be willing to vouch for this particular site), namely "that Section 16600 has consistently been interpreted as invalidating any employment agreement that unreasonably interferes with an employee’s ability to compete with an employer _after_ his or her employment ends".
I'm not a lawyer (I assume you aren't either but at the very least you aren't _my_ lawyer) so I think it's not worth debating this further, we seem pretty firm in our beliefs on this one.
[1] https://www.aalrr.com/Business-Law-Journal/californias-polic...
EDIT: I want to acknowledge that one of the individuals here was a contractor and not an employee. I have no idea how that factors into moonlighting restrictions. I imagine it would be more limited and lean more on what that individual's exact role is at the company? I think my point still stands that my understanding is that the general situation for the average software engineer is more nuanced.
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...
As far as arguments about community, Shopify IS the community by virtue of being the ones putting up pretty much all the money to keep this ship afloat.
If you don't have skin in the game your positions won't be taken seriously.
Depending on your point of view, Sidekiq either turned their back on the community or tried to start a coup by pulling funding just so they could morally grandstand.
Andre's removal is easily justifiable by his own (lengthy history of) sketchy behavior.
Since when is "open source" something businesses shouldn't be allowed to get value from or even have a stake in? These things are MIT licensed. That's free as in speech AND beer. If you don't like the freedoms of the license and how other people use them, don't use the license. If you don't like someone's stewardship, fork and maintain your own.
Shopify paying for infrastructure related to Ruby is an investment, not charity. Hosting gems costs money and a healthy community depends on that gem hosting. Spotify, in turn, depends on that healthy community to produce and maintain gems, train future employees, stuff like that. They’re not paying that money for fun, it is to protect their interests.
And all of the above would be true even if the OSS committee wasn’t 100% Shopify affiliated. That’s gravy.
Yes, I do. All hardware and bandwidth are donated by Fastly and AWS so it costs RC nothing. Their expenses were $20,000/mo for 24/7 ops coverage: $2000/mo for 6 people and $8000/mo for service maintenance (e.g. db and software upgrades). So $240,000/yr, not "millions".
You can't unilaterally declare someone "sketchy" and then kick them out in the name of conveience.
People having concerns about Andre's behavior around his money and his open source contributions can't even be called an open secret.
The narrative that one side of this is pushing that this is some little guys vs evil corporate overlords problem is short-circuiting so many peoples' ability to rationalize about this topic.
This is about the personal failings to communicate and organize among a very small group of highly skilled, highly productive people. It's also about how they have fallen into camps and try to apply institutional and social leverage in order to influence millions of bystanders in order to maintain/wrest control. Each credibly accusing the other of doing it for their own benefit.
Nobody is in the right here. If you can't engage with that as your starting point, you aren't serious about this conversation and are just spouting one side's propaganda.
In the aftermath us bystanders are left wanting either stability or revolution. Revolutions generally aren't good for anyone. Especially the people who want it the most.
Not an accurate characterization.
There are some people who do feel this way. But it's not everyone, by a long shot.
You are right that this ten year long interpersonal beef is ultimately at the root of all of this.
I've known him personally for years and find him perfectly fine as a person. The Rubygems maintainers worked with him for the past decade without issue. Until you cite actual issues, not vague "concerns", you're just spreading FUD and innuendo.
It appears unfair. That's the extent of my rationale. I've not seen any concrete evidence to draw any further conclusion than this. If you're managing a project and you're not cognizant of this, you probably shouldn't be managing projects; in particular, you should stay away from open source projects with a large base of volunteer contributors.
> Nobody is in the right here.
So, they went through all of this, made themselves look bad, cast tons of aspersions, and in the end, they weren't even in the right? This seems a shabby defense.
> are just spouting one side's propaganda.
I don't care about one side or the other. You see this giant crater left by these decisions though? Yea.. that's the problem.
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