I'm not sure how anyone familiar with open-source communities would fail to predict the backlash though. They really should have forked the repository and switched the deployments over to their downstream fork (if I'm right about the root cause here).
(I'm mostly thinking in terms of supply-chain attacks, like this one: https://blog.rubygems.org/2025/08/25/rubygems-security-respo...)
Who is "we"? And what did they witness?
All we got right now is one side of the story.
It is indeed surprising such change wouldn't be immediately followed by a public announcement, but they've been founding and managing RubyGems for a very long time now, so it's not even clear to me how this can be a "takeover".
I'll happily join with my pitchfork if it turns out this is indeed a malevolent move, but until I've read their side of the story, I'd rather wait and see.
Edit: 35 minutes later, here we go: https://rubycentral.org/news/strengthening-the-stewardship-o...
https://rubycentral.org/news/strengthening-the-stewardship-o...
> "Their work laid much of the foundation we are building on today, and we are committed to carrying that legacy forward with the same spirit of openness and collaboration."
what do they mean by openness, it doesn't even say who wrote this
The cancellation of DHH's keynote was purely political. At that time, RubyCentral's response was similarly uncommunicative and their explanation was BS.
This is not the first strike.
The (mostly PR) explanation they produced seems to express roughly the same thing I was guessing though: https://rubycentral.org/news/strengthening-the-stewardship-o...
I'm just reposting it though. I haven't followed any of this myself.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1nkzszc/ruby_centrals...
I would GitHub would be quite well-positioned to set up infrastructure around a fork of RubyGems if things fall apart.
TL;DR: I've been given a lot of private nuance from both sides here but, even just based how the two sides have treated me personally, it's very hard not to put the blame primarily on RubyCentral. I've been a maintainer on Homebrew for 16 years: it's a hard job. If in doubt: I'll side with maintainers.
The other people I know who had their accesses removed have resigned from RC a while ago, and the one I still see with access on https://rubygems.org/gems/bundler are people I know are currently employed or contractors.
As far as I can tell, this part of the Ruby Central statement seems to check out. Now you can of course debate whether commit rights should be limited to employees, but have have no indication that they lied here.
The Ruby Central that dropped him is not the same people running Ruby Central today.
"Ruby Central has been the RubyGems maintainer and operator since the beginning. They paid people to work on it (including this now disgruntled former contractor).
They're improving their practices and protocols. This is good."
The project is an objective public-good. It's sad that a former employee is attempting to burn it all down. I guess they thought it was all about them and not the millions of DAU's the platform has served without fail since inception. Contractors will come and go.
What are the OPs contributions even? I don't see a single commit from her handle on the 24 month view (below). Correct me if I'm wrong.
https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/graphs/contributors...
https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%...
As mentioned in a sibling comment, there's a Q&A with him and other members of Ruby Central on Tue. Here's a link to the signup: >>45302629
> How can they remove maintainers from their own projects? If my project is yawaramin/foobar...
The official RubyGems projects in question were under a GitHub organizational account, not a single user's account. A subset of the maintainers had the "owner" flag on the org. One of those folks basically initiated the takeover. See [2] for a more detailed recounting.
[1]: Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover - >>45348390 - September 2025 (107+ comments)
[2]: https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/#the-takeover
Now I just have to hope the fallout from this includes a less centralized replacement for the tools I'm used to - I haven't found anything solid yet, but I imagine andre will be examining this problem space with rv now.