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[return to "A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy"]
1. coryth+w9[view] [source] 2025-09-21 20:34:45
>>Qwuke+(OP)
Very reasonable other side to this story, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Too bad it didn’t hit the front page.

People went WAY too far WAY too fast on this. There HAS to be urgency to this, the software supply chain is presently, undeniably, under attack.

Frankly, everyone blasting RubyCentral the last few days should feel shame and embarrassment. These aren’t evil suits at Microsoft, they’re normal people invested in maintaining a critical piece of infrastructure for the good of all who love and profit from Ruby.

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2. jaredc+MG[view] [source] 2025-09-22 02:06:58
>>coryth+w9
What? This article is absolutely damning re: RC's leadership and the utter lack of proper transparency, strategic planning, marketing/PR, and solid OSS governance. Did we read the same article?!
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3. picadi+rV2[view] [source] 2025-09-22 17:53:45
>>jaredc+MG
i read the article, but didn't see anything damning about it. how big of a staff do you think a tiny 501c3 like RubyCentral is? RC shepherds a pretty small community around a niche DSL with a shoestring non-profit budget that mostly goes towards running conferences.. you can see their financial reports here https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/300...

expectations around "strategic planning" and "marketing/PR" are not realistic. You should just be glad these randos don't have admin access to the Github org anymore. Any one of them were huge targets for adversaries who want to ship malware in Rubygems, supply chain attacks are very real and having commit access directly to rubygems/bundler is too powerful for a rando.

my main takeaway from reading all this is why were so many assorted people given such high levels of access..

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4. nightp+o03[view] [source] 2025-09-22 18:15:33
>>picadi+rV2
"These randos" are our friends and fellow contributors. Probably everybody in the Ruby community has worked with theme in one capacity or another. The article provides no reason why they should have had their contribution permissions revoked. Just because you think of Ruby as a "niche DSL" and the people maintaining its core infrastructure as "randos" doesn't mean the rest of us do.
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5. picadi+j06[view] [source] 2025-09-23 15:59:52
>>nightp+o03
just because someone is a nice community member doesn't mean they deserve rewrite-the-commit history admin level access to rubygems and bundler. they can be great committers even without the ego boost of knowing you hold the keys to get a ton of companies hacked without interference.

also, if you step back, Ruby's problem is it consists of a fading community of millenials and Gen Xers who first came to Rails when it was the best/coolest option. however with the majority of builders now turning to JS for web, Rust (and Go) for systems, and Python for ML, it doesn't have a use case anymore that can drive a community or any hope for growth in the future. so a "niche DSL" for legacy webapps and plugin systems is what's left IMO, but i'm sorry for being super frank about it

languages like this with a shrinking community and loose security policies pose around the centralized package management system pose high security risks to its users.

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