The Ruby community has been eating itself alive since almost the beginning, but it is sad to see the short-sighted destruction of trust and connection that this has had.
I don’t quite get how this happened? Ruby Central can’t just reach into my GitHub and declare they own something. Was it under the Ruby central account? Or an org account that decided they “own” the repo?
I distinctly remember a specific Twitter comment, maybe 7ish years ago, that solidified my view on DHH as a person. It was a thread about remote work. Someone from South America commented trying to be nice to David, saying something like "you should work remotely from Chile, it has a great Ruby community" etc, to which his response was "I've no interest in living in a 3rd world country".
Notch-esque politics aside, that was mean-spirited, inconsiderate behavior which should not be applauded. From that day I strongly sensed that was who he truly was.
Personally, I think DHH is a troll and would never be interested in sponsoring, or attending, an event that involved him.
Honest question: What's the issue with DHH here? What did he do that caused them to pull support because he was platformed at RailsConf?
https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems
A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
Having a city turn from majority British to British being minority means something very strange and damaging is happening.
An Update from Ruby Central - >>45344448 - Sept 2025 (1 comment)
A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy - >>45325792 - Sept 2025 (148 comments)
Goodbye, RubyGems - >>45306135 - Sept 2025 (1 comment)
Ruby Central's response to the RubyGems situation - >>45301949 - Sept 2025 (1 comment)
Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems [pdf] - >>45299170 - Sept 2025 (244 comments)
DHH has been going off the deep end with his rhetoric for years, the current political environment has made it so that he can't be ignored anymore.
https://www.shopify.com/news/david-heinemeier-hansson-board
Shopify's support for DHH's world view makes sense. Shopify's executive team has been right-wing for a while now:
https://pressprogress.ca/shopify-executives-right-wing-media...
https://disconnect.blog/the-conservative-tech-alliance-is-co...
But Shopify is also right wing in its executive team, and via these move they appear to be support DHH:
https://pressprogress.ca/shopify-executives-right-wing-media...
https://disconnect.blog/the-conservative-tech-alliance-is-co...
And yeah, Shopify is going to protect DHH because DHH is on Shopify's board:
He also doesn't live here. What does he know about London?
> In his blog post, André says, “For the last ten years or so of working on Bundler, I’ve had a wish rattling around: I want a better dependency manager. It doesn’t just manage your gems, it manages your ruby versions, too. It doesn’t just manage your ruby versions, it installs pre-compiled rubies so you don’t have to wait for ruby to compile from source every time. And more than all of that, it makes it completely trivial to run any script or tool written in ruby, even if that script or tool needs a different ruby than your application does.”
> Bluesky threads reveal that Rafael França (Shopify / Rails Core) saw this tool as a threat, saying “some of the “admins” even announced publicly many days ago they were launching a competitor tool [rv] and were funding raising for it. I’d not trust the system to such “admin”.”
So a dev was innovating to make better tool to meet their needs (which is what most open source maintainers are generally doing all day), and then some guys immediately jumped to the possibility that they would then actively sabotage RubyGems? Whoa, that is insane.
Trying to kill innovation and a start-up out of fear doesn't sound like Shopify's branding in the media.
But...it makes it a little difficult to build an inclusive open source community with that at your head.
I just wish we could get to the part where the community can know and trust that our supply chain is safe and can be trusted.
Also, people opposing it (Sidekiq, the guys starting "rv", etc...) have a vested financial interest in opposing Rails and rubygems...
It's not just about his politics. DHH is reactionary, mean, dismissive of others' opinions. He acts more like a high school bully than a leader.
Since then, DHH has gone off the deep end with xenophobic, racist, and transphobic comments. I was drawn to the Ruby community because of its kindness and creativity, with people like why the lucky stiff and Jim Weirich. It is a lot less welcoming when DHH repeatedly uses his platform to say that I shouldn't exist or have equal rights.
Do you think non-white can’t be native British. Is Idris Elba not native British?
After hie many generations are you native British or is it impossible if you are not white?
This isn’t about mass immigration, it’s just about immigration as such.
That’s far-right.
Predating the current hostile takeover: •••the vitriol directed at early critics like Zed Shaw •••mysterious departure of _why the lucky stiff •••the contentious Code of Conduct •••DHH •••uneasy truce after the toxic tribalism of the Rails vs. Merb
There's more, but the linked article can send you down more interesting rabbit holes than more bullets on my list
1. Ruby Central hosts, maintains, and sponsors Rubygems and Bundler
2. Based on recent events, it was possible that credentials were stolen (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/60-malicious-...)
3. They decided to lock everyone out until security issues could be resolved
It makes sense to me from a security standpoint, but their communication has been terrible which has led to a lot of speculation.
> After hie many generations are you native British or is it impossible if you are not white?
Consider the existence and meaning of the term "Native American", then ask yourself these questions again.
Can you point to any of his blog posts that says this ?
I guess I’m so old that I remember not paying much attention to personal lives and looking at code contributions and collaboration behavior. I think that being a sensitive collaborator who builds changes was more relevant than swearing at people or saying rude things.
I once worked for a company where one developer hit another in the face with a keyboard. Was it wrong, yes of course. But we still delivered a pretty decent product.
I don’t really care if you, or others feel I should exist or not. Or whether they think I should or shouldn’t have rights, unless you mean permissions to change and maintain code.
It's true Ruby Central was a fiasco and the maintainers should have been treated better. But the author's investigation misses important elements like the "culture war" on both sides. That seems to be prime motivation for everyone involved, given the flames raging in the comments below.
that's an unfair take; the Ruby community was excellent at the beginning
Ruby Central hosts the RubyGems service, not the RubyGems repository. Ruby Central employs some RubyGems maintainers but does not own the repository. Ruby Central decided to make their employees who are maintainers take over the repository against the wishes of the other maintainers so they could remove some of the maintainers from the project.
Zed Shaw, sure, but that's a single person (though a very vocal one; I always liked his work, but he was pretty outspoken and that got under people's skin)
DHH - yes, opinionated to a fault and outspoken like ZS, prone to create division, but that was always more about Rails than Ruby (this is not a comment on DHH recently, which I know nothing about; I stopped being active in Ruby/Rails community over a dozen years ago).
Rails vs Merb - again I think you're conflating the Rails community with the Ruby community
> There's been a ton of that, yes...
What are you saying - because some people got rich off Ruby, it's OK that those things happened?
Clearly not - Ruby will be lucky to have a shadow of the community left after this.
I follow him on Twitter and guy is a bully and has opinions about stuff he has 0 knowledge about.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-social-media-censorship-era-is...
Someone can shush away any behavior if they want, like you have done. Feel free to provide an alternate history or context for the current Ruby community upheaval if you want, but just dismissing the problems of the past doesn't help anyone.
> It's true Ruby Central was a fiasco and the maintainers should have been treated better.
Treated better as in ... not removed from their own projects? Treated better as in... not kicked out of things they built by someone else who has something to gain?
Treated better is not the phrase to describe what should have happened here.
This is kind of the problem. People parrot this stuff with no further investigation.
The project promised a lot in the beginning and some folks new to a language like Ruby were so enthused by what they could do that they didn't pay much attention to the admin drama at the beginning.
This was likely a reaction to a mix of NPM + culture war/deplatforming, where power player got nervous and decided to clamp down on rubygems security to insulate it from hypothetical bad actors.
I'm on the record saying RC did a poor job rolling out these changes and treated the maintainers poorly.
There will be a lot of amazing Rubyists that leave, which is terrible, but it won't be "the shadow of a community left" because there's way too many people who depend on it to feed their families.
In the world of "I'm sorry to that man" this seems like a given about literally everything.
Not knowing something happened is called being uninformed, and it doesn't change things or make the person right just because they don't know about something that occurred.
> There will be a lot of amazing Rubyists that leave
We agree. Listen, WebObjects still has a somewhat active community. Ruby's community won't be helped by recent events, but recent events happened because the Ruby community has been backstabby for a long time and no one has stopped it because there's too much money to be made in the meantime to care about things like people.
Ridiculously bold to say when what happened here was literally a malicious supply chain attack.
Update: To be fair, I haven't followed DHH/Rails/Ruby community for the past decade (was very involved ~15 yrs ago), so my views may be outdated. Still I think pulling the funding doesn't help Ruby.
Yes, but you don't really need to worry, because those things aren't a real threat to you. Imagine if you were a member of a minority group making up 1% of the population, with a government actively persecuting you.
> I'm not sure what corner of the Ruby world you've been hiding in.
I did say that I haven't been involved for the past dozen years. Before that I was definitely there when Rails burst onto the Ruby scene and its early years. I realize the overlap but they were still pretty distinct -- though maybe that's changed in the past decade.
I developed with Ruby from the beginning and loved Ruby on Rails for many reasons. The community's backstabbing nature and callousness toward people who put a lot of work in was not something I ever admired and it's led us here.
It’s also worth nothing that DHH has moved against André before, via organizing a letter to his Board. In addition to any personal dispute and radically different politics (André is about as left as DHH is right in labor issues) there is how that’s played out in funding open source. André founded RubyTogether as a trade guild and DHH seemed to disapprove of rubygems/bundler maintainers getting paid directly by community support like that. I do not know if a black trans woman getting paid was part of what DHH was against or if she was collateral damage in his move.
André annd another maintainer worked (and a designer), together through my company on rubygems stuff for RC, at a great discount. Mostly we tried to structure it so they kept getting paid enough for to cover health insurance for their families, etc, while mostly rolling our company down.
It’s hard not to read it as “people who worked closely with André, whether or not they were going to work on RV, were targeted”. I think the fact that I am also a trans woman is bores coincidental, even given DHH’s politics. I don’t think he even remembers who I am and I don’t we mostly a tangential factor in any of this.
I'm still struggling to understand the "why."
(That's not an implicit criticism of the article, which is extremely appreciated because it's neutral and factual)
I've been away from Ruby for a few years but Shopify always seemed like a huge net positive, sponsoring lots of valuable work on both Ruby and Rails. I never followed Ruby community happenings very closely but I'm not aware of negative feelings towards their community role in the past.
Yes there is drama, recently especially, but there have been some fantastic people involved for decades
Reading through this, I’m not sure what the fear is of Shopify taking a larger role. They’ve been strong contributors to Ruby for a really long time. Not that I agree with the actions, but I can’t parse what nefarious motives they might have from this article.
In other words, "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die."
He left public programming, including Scratch, entirely.
However, people that espouse intolerance of others based on the colour of their skin is just objectively bad. Sometimes there is a right and a wrong side to things. The problem is that some on the political-right seem to have aligned themselves with policy or viewpoints that stand for hatred.
Bad things happening to contributors year after year for a decade shows a toxic community that doesn't change even over a long period of time
The latest harm is just the continuation of what has been happening since the beginning
> some of which are well resolved
Resolved? Decisions were made, but the tensions were never resolved and people were hurt.
> He left public programming [...] entirely.
Yeah. That's what happens when someone is destroyed after years of their hard work is treated like nothing.
That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition and I don't view the Rails vs Merb period as itself having been problematic.
Merb devs believed we could make app development both simple to start (as a single file like Sinatra) and easy to evolve (into a modular codebase with Rails-like conventions). Existing outside of the Rails ecosystem allowed Merb to pursue that distinct vision.
The Merge between Rails and Merb, accreted many of Merb's modular architectural enhancements to Rails, but sadly deprecated the overall Merb vision. To me that was a shame, but I still wouldn't describe any of it as toxic.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-waning-days-of-dei-s-dominance...
I missed all this drama, it does seem like there is an echo chamber forming over on Bluesky…
And to be clear, you can discuss immigration policy without being racist. In the blog post in question DHH gives his support to a convicted criminal, who is also a former member of an explicitly fascist political party and founder of an islamophobic hate group. That's not 'right-leaning'. It's support for a racist criminal. I'm unsure whether DHH is actually a bigot or just completely engulfed in the rhetoric common on Twitter these days. Either way he's a fucking moron pontificating on something which he has no actual experience of. Maybe when the US invades Greenland and starts deporting the Danes from the US he'll discover empathy.
I don't think he's a white supremacist, but it is understandable that some people don't like his ideas.
Apparently, the reason is having an incorrect opinion.
It might be a situation where you see it differently because you were involved or benefiting from the way things unfolded
> That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition [...] wouldn't describe any of it as toxic
Competition can be healthy, Rails vs Merb was anything but. Quotes from Yehuda himself:
••• "I was just so blinded by tribalism that I never even bothered to check how fundamental the disagreements really were."
••• "waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy"
••• "It's so easy for our brains to turn disagreements about priorities into value conflicts. It takes a lot of effort to see past that mistake."
Whoa! I'm blown away that Sidekiq has enough money in the bank that one of their sponsorships is $250k/yr!
Sidekiq the company (actually ContribSys) is just one guy: Mike Perham.[0]
I listened to an interview with Mike a few years ago, and he seemed like he had an amazing setup. He was making about $1M/yr with no employees, just him selling code and contributing to open-source. I don't think he even has servers to keep online.
According to this podcast from 2023, he's now making close to $10M/yr in revenue and is still just running the whole thing by himself.[0] Great life for a solo dev founder!
[0] https://ruby.social/@getajobmike
[1] https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-661-...
Maybe? This feels like an extreme statement with too much certainty at this point.
And it's not a principled position on open borders nor open migration but instead part of a double standard. These same people probably cheer on the protests in Mexico City against white gringos in Condesa.
That's how I'd summarize the far left position. The far right one is probably that migrants are bad. And I suppose the middle position is that there's a problem when immigration rate outpaces cultural assimilation.
Ruby Central hosts DHH at RailsConf in July --> Sidekiq withdraws funding from Ruby Central --> Ruby Central is essentially entirely dependent on Shopify.
The "what" seems to be purely a reaction to this article DHH posted:
It's certainly possible that Shopify's actions had nothing to do with either side's politics in particular, and they decided it was simply safer for them to control Ruby Cental and RubyGems rather than rely on an independent organization with unstable funding (that they were basically solely funding anyway according to the article)
I don't love that outcome. As a Ruby fan, I don't want Ruby or bits of its infrastructure controlled by a particular organization.
I sense there’s legal grounds here but can’t fully articulate what the legal case would be.
Meanwhile the Ruby core team is in Japan, would you like them to report in for work orders to shopify too?
What he’s saying is that he only considers white British to be legitimately British. He would look at former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and current Mayor Sadiq Khan and dismiss them as insufficiently British. Too much melanin I guess.
He’s even excluded white people from elsewhere who were born in Britain if they have a non-British ancestor. So according to DHH and his ilk Nigel Farage’s children wouldn’t be counted as white British despite having white mothers (Irish and German), being born to a British father in Britain and living all their lives in Britain.
What the fuck is the point of dividing people like this? “Just an opinion” my ass. DHH and people like him are dehumanising my fellow Londoners.
The former is mature, robust, fit for purpose.
The latter is... messy.
DHH's prominent role in the ecosystem and full throated endorsement of reactionary politics has alienated a lot of people who might otherwise have been invested in that community, and this latest maneuvering seems downstream of all that.
At this point the tension between corporate interests (and by extension DHH, who is a central player in that group) and open source / community interests has become frustratingly high, and it all seems like it could have been avoided.
It doesn't mean ruby is dead or even dying, but you can't blame anybody for looking at this and just noping right out over to a community without such drama.
Zed was also a source of vitriol and toxicity, not just a target
I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing. But it inevitably means they will not always be aligned.
Some product surface area remains Ruby, but Ruby was chased away by most teams.
Square brought in a lot of Xooglers over the years to lead the transition, so you see a lot of Google tech: protobufs, gRPCs, at one point a pre-Kubernetes Borg clone, etc.
is he actually US citizen or dual or just Danish?
He’s one of the most active Japanese Ruby core committer, employed by ANPAD, and also part time contractor for Ruby Central, and one of the most active committers to rubygems/bundler.
Ezra's vision for Merb and DHH's vision for Rails were distinct. Both warranted development. Over time, I assume they would have collectively strengthened the Ruby community. It was a mistake for Engine Yard's management to have instead framed it as zero sum and forced a merger.
Sounds like DHH has finally realised he has enough fuck you money. And that is the truest test of character you can ever have.
Elon Musk failed. DHH failed. ... failed. Etc.
DHH seems outright delusional in that post.
After some quick googling I can't find any groups that support that.
I did find a poll that shows 64% of Americans support creating some path for undocumented immigrants to get legal status. I'm not sure you could call 64% a far left position though.
Plus, hell of a good ramen shop near the West End.
Also it’s sort of hard to separate the guy who offers his opinions on his blog and the same guy who offers his opinions at a tech conference.
Oh, I should read the actual tweet? Funny the actual tweet is so much worse than I imagined.
If a trans-women is in a space that she is legally entitled to be in, according to him one should:
> Make, a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him[he means the trans-women] in the balls
He is literally telling people to be violent against trans people. And then cries when actions have consequences.
These people are like the school yard bully who will start a fight with you then cry "timeout, timeout" when you punch back. And go to the teacher to convince you they are the real victim.
Incredibly sad to watch. He literally has no idea what he's talking about.
https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
Discussing Engine Yard now does not seem fruitful if you do not address the quotes provided by Katz which refute your own prior comments
https://www.rubyevents.org/talks/panel-the-past-present-and-...
I also of course did not know the size of his donation, but it’s not that surprising. Especially since he didn’t advertise his reason for donating, or his reason for stopping (both of which are principled).
I'm still very happy with Ruby itself, and how it's developed, and Rails too. While I haven't used it professionally in a while, it's still the language I most enjoy working in. I also used it to get my daughter (now finished college and working as a SWE) into programming when she was a child, and currently using it to introduce my 9 yr old son to coding.
I didn't feel like I was personally in danger, but I'm also a guy who's lived next to American slums.
Shopify wanted to put in place better goverance and access control, to reduce the risk of a supply chain attack and put a deadline on that.
Part time maintenaners left it to the last minute, didn't consult or communicate well and then over exerted their influence by taking over things without consensus to do so.
Existing maintainers then rightfully alarmed, when it all could probably have been handled better.
Doesn't help that the rift over a competing tool being created probably played a part in some of the heavy handedness. DHH's drift to white supremacy probably hasn't helped either, but likely neither are the cause here.
Everyone, you included, has opinions that they find unpalatable. Pretty much all of human history has been "cancelling" people for "incorrect opinions". I mean, what were the crusades? Or world war II?
There's no, like, gun to your head saying you have to respect things you don't respect. Some things are just not respectable. You're allowed to be like "no" and then decide to get as far away from the person as possible.
And, relatedly - you don't have to run away. You can push them away.
Its not really fair that crazy people are allowed to say crazy things then we, normal people, have to take the high ground and walk away. What if I don't want to walk away? Why do I have to leave a project like it's the plague because you said something insane?
Anyway, just my two cents.
Also, just to be clear: I don't think DHH is crazy or evil. I'm addressed the broader concept, not this specific case.
DHH stopped trying to cultivate an inclusive community some time ago. The ruby community can ill afford to drive away more prominent maintainers, yet that is what is happening here, as the corporate interests are aligned with DHH even if the rest of the community is not.
The same way DHH can have opinions, one-man-companies forking the sponsorship momey can have some too. "We" didn't decide anything, a sponsor company decided to stop sponsoring (with no public commentary), that's all that happened.
More to the point, "platforming" is an active operation, I think anyone can decide who they want to promote and why. It's fundamentally different from censoring.
It's funny how far removed it is to all of this drama.
We assume it's linked to DHH because he's an asshole, but that's just our own theories.
The question is, does that even matter to the current regime?
The thing about free speech is that it's only relevant if someone with power hates what you say.
See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/52416-the-trouble-with-figh...
Yes, so did many others and now it has blown up.
> Who cares.
I think Ellen Dash, André Arko, Samuel Giddins, Martin Emde, and even Mike McQuaid could be proposed as individuals who care. In addition to the hundreds of people commenting here.
> While I haven't used it professionally in a while, it's still the language I most enjoy working in.
Perhaps now that you're up to date on some important issues in the Ruby community, you can get involved and help right the ship so the language you love will exist in a few years.
This takes as axiomatic that people with incompatible beliefs in one area cannot work together in a different area.
I'd actually think stuff like that recent npm worm would be a bigger danger than whatever this mess is?
now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! he was definitely one of the prominent people keeping the ruby mailing list fun and friendly back in the day; I miss that early ruby era where everyone was enthusiastic about how nice the language felt to use.
They don't "support unlimited immigration", they reject the legitimacy of national borders and of immigration as a concept.
For example here's the DSA explaining their view that the national border and immigration statuses are capitalist and imperialist tools to divide the working class: https://www.dsausa.org/blog/fighting-the-security-state-at-t...
even before, during and after the fascist protest he is celebrating (as an immigrant in america, telling about his daydreaming on being an immigrant in the UK), there have been arrests for people simply saying "killing children is wrong" all over london.
yet he could not pick any of those arests for his example. yeah, it's plain and simple white supremacists. get over it.
A two-key-rule system would be neat. A repo can be in an org, but some big changes (removing/adding a maintainer, moving a repo, renaming an org, etc) need to have x of total maintainer accounts click an approve button within a few days of each other. Making big changes slow and tedious feels ideal when we're talking about the countless lifehours sunk into a project by maintainers, that's funded and supported by a company. Both of those parties benefit from cooling off periods and being a bit obstinant to eachother... without being able to slit eachothers throats.
Usually when this kind of stuff is rolled out, it’s agreed upon in some form and documented. Then when people are surprised, it’s a matter of pointing to the section in the doc that’s relevant and everybody goes on their way.
From the outside it appears this had none of that, so people are understandably surprised, sad, or angry. Since there’s a lack of transparency, people are filling in the blanks.
Ok there it is. That would explain why they’re being so cagey. I thought there had to more to this.
And, even if you can, it doesn't mean it's pleasant.
Its one thing if someone is horrible in silent. From experience, horrible people seem to be the most confident and outspoken. Maybe there's a common character flaw that underpins both behaviors.
Instead it’s people abusing the trust and power they have to try and cancel DHH because they don’t agree with him about some things. Absolutely sickens me to see the cancellation in motion. Completely bigoted and self righteous behaviour.
a) Nod politely and try to change the subject?
b) Tell him you think he’s nuts and you prefer not to discuss politics with him?
c) Find a different dentist because this makes you uncomfortable and you’re not sure you can trust his judgement?
d) Tell your friends that this dentist has some weird political views, and here’s a new dentist you found that you like?
e) Start a pressure campaign to shame anyone who still goes to this dentist?
Because I think everything except the last one would be a fair reaction, but I can’t ever tell which one people are talking about.
I'm still not sure that's representative of the far left. Like I said, the more right wing libertarian position is probably the same, though for different reasons.
"Beliefs" are when you think The Strokes are superior to The White Stripes, or that Giordano's deep dish pizza is superior to Lou Malnati's, or that IPAs are better than lagers. I'll happily work with people who espouse those beliefs, despite my beliefs to the contrary.
I won't work with people who describe a Tommy Robinson march as "heartwarming", or who use terms like "demographic nightmare" [1] to describe immigration, or who amplify repeatedly-debunked [2] claims of "Pakistani rape gangs", all of which DHH did. That's bigotry, not beliefs.
British culture isn't being eroded by immigration. It's being shaped by it, just like it has been for thousands of years. Where do you think your culture came from- thin air?!?
- Romans gave Britain roads, baths, and Christianity.
- Anglo-Saxons gave Britain Old English.
- Vikings gave Britain laws and half its place names.
- Normans made French the language of power and fused it with English.
- The Crusades brought new foods, science, and art.
And so on and so on.
It's the height of ignorance to look at that incredibly diverse history, and then say "OK, but right now is the moment in time where we 'lock in' our culture for the rest of time." Culture has never stood still, and no one, not even DHH, gets to freeze it in place. Well, they can try, but they'll be pissing in the wind, just like the Tommy Robinson marchers were.
I'll just leave this here: the folks in this Instagram reel [3], wearing the St. George's Cross flag and clearly on their way to the march, decided to stop and get a curry first. With the caption "When you're on your way to the racist march but the immigrant food is popping."
1. https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
2. https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
What if I have a lot of friends? Is it now a pressure campaign?
What makes something telling the truth, and what makes something a campaign?
And, why do people so thoroughly fear the truth being told about them? Is that shame, or something else?
If you wish privacy, as we all do often, then stay private. Its easy and free.
But when your opinion is posted online and you willingly tie it to your real life identity, you cannot get canceled. No, in my mind, it's impossible.
You may cancel yourself. But people simply repeating your own words back to you is not a campaign, it's just a reminder of reality and truth.
I guess I would say that withdrawing funding from an organization based on who they let speak at an event seems like an overreaction given that it had these ramifications, but I don’t think it’s my place to judge what anyone chooses to contribute their own money to. None of the rest of us is contributing $250k to Ruby Central either, and we’re not entitled to have Mike solve our problems.
I don't really want to continue debating the other points, but I will say one last thing. There's a difference between caring about the language/ecosystem/community, and caring about the drama introduced by certain individuals. I care very much about the former, and I believe the latter to be an unhelpful distraction rather than something to be "solved". But that's just me.
And just to clarify: when I say "who cares", I was talking about some of this drama in the past, egos and whatnot. I am _not_ talking about what just happened now with RubyCentral. I consider that to be a serious problem with real-world consequences that go beyond disputes/differences of opinions. It's no way to handle OSS and treat maintainers. It does put a bad stain on RubyCentral, which is unfortunate.
But, if you push back or criticise them, that is something wrong. The harm can go only one way - from bigots to the rest of us. But other way round, once you funded bigots you have to continue with it.
If this is the reason, I am behind this takeover. It’s weeding out bad actors that have a shortsighted mentality.
I do not want RubyGems and Bundler to become yet another pair of ideological playgrounds for people that spend more time protesting unrelated causes than actually _writing and developing software_.
Ruby Central screwed themselves by relying on basically two large donors for their funding, and then offended one of those two donors.
However, if I found out that one of the physicians I work with doesn't think I should have a job, doesn't think I should have equal rights, and doesn't think I belong in public spaces, then politics would become unavoidable. I'm not going to work for a bigot who sees me as a second class citizen.
Likewise there are a number of long-term Ruby OS contributors who belong to minority groups DHH has been attacking. Would you attend Railsconf if DHH called your ethnicity gangs of rapists, like he recently has?
I'm from Africa so I'm born with the instincts that luckily prevented me from losing anything or getting hurt.
I was just visiting the UK for 3 weeks, but that gave me a perspective how bad immigration laws can turn it into something out of control.
Why does a place like Singapore, where 48% of its workforce are immigrants / expats - not have this problem.
It remains the safest place on Earth.
- do not turn away from debate - do not turn to or espouse violence[1] - and their contributions were of merit
Since DHH has done none of that then the answer is "yes, it's okay to put him on a stage to talk about tech".
[1] I thank Karl Popper for showing the way here with his Paradox of tolerance.
[2] Bob was the master of self-deprecating jokes, I hope he would appreciate that one.
If I understand correctly, Sidekiq's owner pulled his funding from Ruby Central because of his concerns with DHH. That's... one person.
Of course, many dislike DHH's views. Others like him more for his views. He is outspoken about controversial topics. Obviously this garners him fans, and detractors. Using terms like "canceled" is deeply useless at best.
One person who was a major funder of RubyCentral pulled funding because they were upset at RubyCentral platforming DHH. Neither that person, nor RubyCentral, had control over or ownership of the RubyGems software at that time, though RubyCentral operated the rubygems.org service, which uses the RubyGems software.
The corporation that is the other major funder of RubyCentral (Shopify) responded to this (taking advantage of the fact that this left them the sole significant funder of RubyCentral whom RubyCentral could not afford to alienate) to direct RubyCentral to, without any plausible claim of right, seize control of the RubyGems software repos, and kick out anyone who wasn’t a full-time RubyCentral employee from them.
It’s not about DHH except that that indirectly provided the opportunity, it’s about Shopify seeking to consolidate control of core Ruby infrastructure.
I can totally see someone seizing the opportunity there. (And if you think it is a good idea, you are a terrible person)
I work for a small company who helps financially for ruby community, and they strongly advocate for other same size companies to do the same so there is balance.
It would be terrible for pypi, rubygems, brew and other repos to be used as political or economical tools.
Large companies can fork and keep living for a while or pay the cost. But for everyone else, including people developing ideas at home, it would be a shot through the heart.
So if you have a company that can help those orgs, press them to do so. If you have 5 USD to help, also do it. It makes the difference.
This is all a callout for people to step in and really help open source and free software before it is too late.
It can be by doing work, participating of the discussions, helping reviewing costs and expenses or even money.
This will certainly trigger the heads of evil dudes in suits and it will become a darker scenario.
Unfortunately, and very unfortunately, the world that Stallman predicted is here and we are late to start pushing back.
And wouldn't that constitute a violation of ownership? Or did the authors wave that away by joining the respective GitHub org in the first place?
But if there is only few funding it might come back to bite me. So maybe such cases are bad technology choices. Even if one is not malicious now, it does not tell about future or any decisions they might force through.
I strongly believe that low fertility causes immigration backlash because some governments try to maintain their population by importing immigrants rather than fixing the fertility issue and a low fertility causes the domestic population to be insecure (e.g. "replacement theory") in the face of the immigrants. Some immigration combined with sustainable fertility is the solution.
What instead often happen when they hear I'm Norwegian is a complete mask-off moment where they start explaining their favorite racist thinking to me, assuming that since I'm from a group they like, apparently I'm expected to agree with them (I do not).
My main exposure to anti-immigrant thinking face to face in London over the last 25 years have been repeated incidences of people who "just have concerns about immigration" revealing their racist motivations to me without me even asking them.
In other words: I don't buy it for a second when people try to insist it's immigration they care about, rather than seeing non-white faces.
In other words, it can be read more charitably as a lamentation about the loss / changing of a culture.
However, Shopify sells SAAS thst runs on open source. What does it benefit them to take over key aspects of infrastructure?
If they disliked what was happening with the OSS tools, they are big and rich enough to maintain forks or their own toolchain.
The OP seems to be associating the start of this controversy with some feud between DHH and the founder of Sidekiq. Shopify is indeed quite aligned with DHH. And there’s some controversy about so-called supply chain attacks, which I understand might inspire a call for a more locked-down organization. But as an outsider I am confused.
Capital does what is good for capital. What is good for capital will inevitably deviate from what is good for a community.
I aspired to be like Jim. We all should.
He made time for anyone who wanted to engage him in a sincere discussion. He helped a lot of newer people. He wrote beautiful tools that we still use.
He embodied MINASWAN. That has been the core of Ruby's community.
DHH has been pretty damn far from that.
Did many of us find Ruby through Rails? Sure. Does that mean that Ruby should be stewarded by someone who is intolerant and therefore exclusionary? No.
That's the opposite of MINASWAN.
To preempt any potential objections on the basis of the removed funding from Sidekiq based similarly on a relationship with a single person, there are two pretty crucial differences: the funding was withdrawn because of the relationship the organization had itself with someone, rather than someone involved with something that literally had to be stolen to terminate their involvement, and the funding withdrawn by Sidekiq was done openly with umambiguously communicated intentions. Deciding to not give money to an organization because of an actual choice that they made and tell everyone that is just being transparent about your morals; secretively pressuring an organization to exploit their existing connections to force someone out of a project they don't own and then having them represent it publicly as something they chose to do on their own for the greater good might as well be out of the playbook of organized crime or foreign intelligence services.
"Both sides" is a euphemistic fig leaf of an argument at best.
Then he goes on about 'Pakistani rape gangs' and 'abuse of British girls'–oh look, the classic trope of the nasty browns and blacks preying on our precious white children.
Then take this: '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.'
These words would not be out of place in 1066 Britain ie 'this is a country of the Saxons, not the Normans'. Britain has seen this exact brand of xenophobia for millennia, in fact they even had periods of bigotry against Danes! If dhh had gone to London at the wrong point in history, he might have experienced racial prejudice.
Interesting, right?
It is murkier as the involvement of some of the original creators in Ruby Central is there, so there are claims to being the original copyright holder applicable to some areas by a very small number of individuals, none of which who are the newly added maintainers, or Ruby Central as a whole entity.
Instead, the intensity of his crackdown, coupled with later statements aligning him with reactionary causes, strongly suggests his “neutrality” was in practice a shield against progressive causes inside Basecamp.
Is it unfair that you can only impose a “no politics” rule without backlash if you’re progressive? Maybe a little. But the asymmetry is baked in: progressives are the ones challenging the status quo, so banning politics almost always protects the status quo and silences the challengers. And in this case, his later positions confirmed that he wasn’t neutral at all, he wasn’t on the side of the people he’d told to leave.
A dick move.
When you do that, you're cancelling someone. That's the difference.
I guess I find it a bit strange that it's so fuzzy who owned the GitHub repo.
So it was owned by a GitHub organization, and someone should have owned that organization no? Maybe the person that created it initially?
You can have more than one person with a role that allows to change ownership of repos owned by an organization, was that the situation here? Did multiple people had that permission and one of them re-owned the repo to themselves without any other knowing?
I say that because, I don't normally consider every code contributor to a repo, or even admin the owner of a repo.
If I create an open source lib, and then create a GitHub repo for it, and contributors come in, to help commit code, do PRs and even manage the repo, and later I decide to revoke everyone else's access, as the owner, like it's fine. Sure maybe some of the admins might wonder what's up, why I don't trust them administering the repo anymore, but it's my repo.
Here I'm struggling to identify whose repo is it? And was the repo owner kicked out of their own repo, so this is a takeover? Or did the owner just kick out others ?
Wait wait wait, now it's Mike's fault that Shopify acted the way it did and coup'd this organization? Come on. You can't judge his choice to remove funding on what someone else did.
That this is being memory-holed, much like the ill-conceived bilingual education initiatives of the 90s, is actually a good sign, as it's proof that we're winning.
Yes. To de-obfuscate, they sent a message that he should be cancelled. It backfired spectacularly, as it rightfully should have. Good.
It apparently isn't legal in UK? And also not widely legal in the US yet.
Anyways it seems to me that the debate hasn't been completely resolved yet.
It might just sound like something off TV Tropes to you, but even the Labor government's own inquiry [1] on the matter shows that hundreds if not thousands of children were actually molested by such gangs. It even has a chapter on "Denial", which brings your comment to another light:
> Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue. This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities.
For your reading:
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/685559d05225e...
> As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice as much, through the Blitz and the rest of it, yet never lost its nerve. I thought I might move there one day.
> That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. 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.
and that last sentence links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London showing that, well, they're aren't as many white people in London as there used to be.
Now, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it's pretty easy to interpret that as non-white people shouldn't be seen in London. That's not exactly "you, personally, don't belong in public spaces?", but it's seems fairly close to me, to anyone that isn't white. I am open to hearing alternate interpretations of what I quoted from DHH's personal blog though.
Can you say more about this? I haven't heard about this before.
What exactly has been "debunked" about these claims? I realise this is veering off-topic, but the very real facts at the heart of these claims need to be heard. Denying that these things happened only serves to further the abuse the victims have already suffered.
Even the BBC does not deny the existence of these rape gangs nor their heritage:
> It showed how the gang, comprising men of mostly Pakistani and Afghan heritage, plied girls as young as 13 with alcohol and drugs and passed them around for sex. [1]
There is more than 10 years of recorded evidence of these activities, over 250 probable victims, over 90 identified perpetrators, plus a litany of investigation reports detailing the failure of authorities to even properly investigate many of the cases.
> In 2007, Ms Rowbotham and her team had alerted GMP and Rochdale Council about a gang of men of Pakistani and Afghan heritage engaged in child sexual exploitation (CSE) while Ms Oliver resigned from GMP in 2012 to publicly reveal the extent of the police failings. [2]
A senior police officer had to go public to make her own superiours start caring about these crimes. From her wikpedia page:
> When Oliver got upset about the handling of the case, she claims one of her seniors told her, "Maggie, calm down. Listen: What would these kids ever contribute to society? They should have just been drowned at birth". Then, Oliver stormed off the job [3]
Recently, the Greater Manchester Police published multiple investigations into itself. I will quote only the part from the summary that specifically calls out the GMP for deflecting blame for its own failures [4]:
> 2.58. a police source was quoted in the media as saying that the Crisis Intervention Team [..] did not always communicate this to the police and social services.
> 2.59. the two serious case review overview reports published in 2013 explicitly criticised the Crisis Intervention Team for not following child protection procedures and for not communicating appropriately with other agencies [however] the multi-agency CSE strategy group chaired by Chief Superintendent C16 was aware of approximately 127 potential victims who had been referred by the Crisis Intervention Team to children’s social care and that these referrals had not been acted on. This figure later grew to 260 potential victims
> We find this level of misrepresentation quite disturbing. We would have liked to have put our concerns to both the author of the overview reports and the chair of the serious case review panel. These individuals provided a joint written statement that did not directly address these concerns and they declined to be interviewed by the review team.
> 2.60. our review has found compelling evidence to support the view that the Crisis Intervention Team was sharing explicit information with the authorities on the exploitation of multiple children. We also have evidence that, despite these explicit concerns, GMP and Rochdale Council failed to take appropriate action.
> 2.61. it has been a gross misrepresentation to suggest that the Crisis Intervention Team in some way was complicit with this failure and to tarnish the reputation of this small group of professionals
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-66416549
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-67967919
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Oliver
[4] https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/9148/operation...
What has been debunked are the sweeping claims that:
- Sexual exploitation in the UK is disproportionately or uniquely committed by men of Pakistani or Muslim heritage.
- There exists a singular phenomenon of "Pakistani rape gangs" uniquely distinct from other forms of child sexual exploitation.
- The existence of these gangs proves something essential about Pakistani culture or immigration.
Tommy Robinson, and those on the far-right who share his agenda, have weaponized real cases to push their narratives. The big picture from the CSA Centre's own data is that:
"Of defendants proceeded against for child sexual abuse offences in 2022/23, 88% were White, 7% Asian, 3% Black and 2% Mixed or Other ethnicities." [1]
Compare that to the census: Asians (including South Asians) are 9% of the population but only 7% of offenders (i.e. under-represented). Meanwhile, white Britons are 82% of the population but 88% of CSE offenders (they're actually over-represented). According the Home Office’s own review, "The majority of child sexual abuse gangs are made up of white men under the age of 30." [2]
Racist grifters love to flog lurid myths about "Pakistani rape gangs" to frighten gullible Britons into voting against immigration. And racist griftees eat those stories up, because in their eyes, rape by a non-white person is somehow "worse" or "scarier" than rape by a white person. But if someone is genuinely worried about roving gangs of ethnically homogenous rapists, they should probably avoid Robinson’s marches. Statistically, that's where they're more likely to be.
1. https://www.csacentre.org.uk/app/uploads/2024/02/Trends-in-O...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/15/child-sexua...
Yeah, that's kind of the point. Preserving a culture that is several times as old as the USA.
> > Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits.
> [there] aren't as many white people in London as there used to be. Now, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it's pretty easy to interpret that as non-white people shouldn't be seen in London.... I am open to hearing alternate interpretations
The "alternate interpretation" is that "native Brits" means "native Brits", not "white people". Per your source, in the time frame DHH is talking about, the population was still specifically about 3/5 British. As in, English (and possibly Welsh and Scottish, although I imagine they mostly keep further north). So presumably that's what he actually observed.
A Dane isn't going to see this as a matter of race. Denmark is still about 5/6 ethnic Danish, and a big chunk of immigrants and their descendants are European. The concept of race is just not something you think about when you aren't exposed to it all the time. The difference between an ethnic Dane and and ethnic Englishman is salient to someone like that, in a way that a typical American can't be expected to understand.
We're talking here about people who are in their ancestral homeland. They are the natives of the area; they don't have anywhere to go back to. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons have been there since the 5th century — far longer than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_people have been in New Zealand, for example. And London was founded by the Romans, even longer ago than that. And those groups were both fully admixed with the indigenous population long before the establishment of modern immigration policy. So now we have recognizable "native Brits" who look different from modern-day "native Italians" or "native Germans". Not to mention, those indigenous island folk would presumably have been quite pale themselves.
If someone were pointing out that the settlements of Turtle Island were no longer full of First Nations peoples, would you make that out to be about race? Rounding all of this off to "white people" is a projection of an Americentric view of race, and frankly offensive. It's strange to me how there are people who put effort into knowing about the cultural and ethnic and religious distinctions found across, say, South Asia, and seem to think themselves morally superior for caring; but couldn't be bothered to do the same for Europe.
Your source doesn't establish this. It claims without evidence that Robinson's claims (and those of such partisans) originate in some particular report that I've never heard of despite years of keeping tabs on people who make those claims.
From what I can tell, the claims those people are making about rape in the UK generally have a much broader statistical basis; see e.g. https://archive.ph/jmS6q (the original Statista link isn't working for me, for whatever reason). Claims specifically about the gangs are based in things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit... (and note all the "See also" links). (But also see tremon's comment.)
The claim about conviction rates is missing the point entirely, that the Robinson protesters allege a wide-scale cover-up and bias against prosecuting the immigrants, ostensibly out of police fear of appearing racist.
> Where do you think your culture came from- thin air?!?
It's not mine (I'm Canadian), but yes, it literally did. Just like everyone else's. Thin air, and time. Time spent on doing things in the same way and noticing the patterns, and socializing.
> And so on and so on.
First off, infrastructure is not culture.
But the important thing is that all those events were centuries ago, taking place over the course of centuries. And in many cases they involved bloody wars and a whole ton of resentment. (Pretty understandable considering that the existing population, in each case, was trapped on an island.)
British culture was created by adapting ideas that were left behind in those conflicts. Just like every other culture is created by people with a shared identity picking up ideas, however they might be sourced, and forming a memeplex around them. That adaptation is what makes it British culture, and not "some combination of Roman, Anglo-Saxon etc. culture that doesn't deserve a name". That's why, for example, there was a Middle English, and eventually just more-or-less-modern English. A big chunk of that involved scholars independently studying Latin for their own reasons.
It's especially galling that you would whitewash the Norman invasions like this, considering the meaning and history of the two-finger salute. The same supposed "white supremacists" leading the charge in the UK still have less than pleasant banter for the French. The British literally developed culture by resisting foreign influence. (The whole "Britannia rules the waves" thing is also "culture", BTW.)
Anyway, none of these things involved the existing government consciously bringing in outsiders and completely transforming the population of major centers in the space of a generation or two. (Meanwhile, there are other parts of Europe — like the part DHH is from — that have not been subject to this. Should the EU be compelling them to follow suit or something?) This isn't about "locking in" culture; it's about understanding how the development (as opposed to displacement, or appropriation) of culture actually works.
> decided to stop and get a curry first
This is actually illustrative. Culture isn't just a curry recipe; it's the ritual of stopping for a curry with your mates. And eating it with English table manners, etc. Meanwhile, I can't fathom that the curry available in London actually reflects the cultural diversity of curry preparation within India; nor can I fathom that it hasn't been adapted in some ways to the local palate.
You can't just gift a cultural artifact to another people. Culture doesn't work that way.
(And if you think about what the word "colonialism" means to you, this should be obvious.)
You aren't being restricted from engaging in pushback or criticism.
You're just receiving some of your own.
Part of which involves disputing your framing of who is or isn't a "bigot".
No, I think the dick move (in the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0la5DBtOVNI sense) is raising hue and cry because the opportunity to see another influential person at a convention somehow ruins the rest of the convention for you.
And are we seriously arguing that the creator of the thing should be barred from a convention about the thing?
"Progressives" (I don't think the label is accurate for the group it describes) are also the ones who believe that "protecting the status quo" entails doing "politics".
This contradicts your supposition of racism rather than enhancing it.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It's the same thing, because the motivation for the immigration policy, per the people implementing it, is to avoid demographic collapse.
Generally too many people can also reasonably be considered a problem, if the intended solution to the social services problem is endless exponential growth. Especially on an island.
> (whom he can tell by looking at them)
There are different ethnicities of "white people" who can be told apart by looking. So "he can tell by looking" does not mean that he is applying a racial standard.
Your argument depends on a notion that English, Italians, Germans etc. "all look the same". But last I checked, people who would say the same about, for example, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans would be called racist for that.
The table doesn't distinguish "British" from "non-British" for non-white people, so it would be rather hard to account for that.
But if he's referring to an ethnicity (really a narrow group of ethnicities) rather than a nationality then of course that would entail a range of skin tones what people would normally call "white". And yes, that thinking would necessarily exclude Idris Elba.
But then if this is really about worrying about "white people", then why is he also excluding the non-British white people from his figure? Can it really not just be that there exists an English ethnicity (and Scottish and Welsh) that has been there for centuries and has nowhere else to go?
> This isn’t about mass immigration, it’s just about immigration as such.
There is no such distinction.
You ask "after how many generations are you native British"; I can equally well ask "after how many immigrants is it mass immigration".
The point is that the rate of immigration has been sufficient to completely overwhelm the native birthrate, causing a rapid demographic shift.
When the UK colonized India in the first place, the population did not become minority-Indian at all, let alone within the space of a couple of generations.
Have any of them ever proposed to you to expel the established black families? If they're just being racist, you should naturally expect it to extend that far, right?
For me, this means that brew will eventually phase out.
damn, you are really catching the straws here to defend a racist
It's obvious he meant brown people or anyone that isn't white/european looking.
There is no genetically pure or distinct native British phenotye to set apart other europeans.
Europeans have been mixing themselves for centuries, he obviously knew what he was talking about (non-whites)
> There is no genetically pure or distinct native British phenotye to set apart other europeans.
Nevertheless, such ancestry can be reliably determined by genetic testing, and Europeans do recognize it by sight. https://blog.23andme.com/articles/23andme-adds-more-detail-f....
Shopify however is a deeply evil company that is literally run by Nazis. Not a metaphor, like, actual Nazis.
Reading further into DHH's blog post reveals even more troubling context. He describes Tommy Robinson organized marches as being "normal everyday Brits." When white supremacist, xenophobic marches are your idea of "normal everyday Brits," the mask rather slips, doesn't it? He attempts to equate these marches with legitimate free speech cases like Graham Linehan, trying to make it all seem like reasonable pushback, as if this is just another historical moment of the isles being "invaded". The rhetoric is telling.
It takes DHH only 701 words before he's linking to articles about Pakistani rape gangs. At this point, we're not dealing with subtle implications anymore.
The argument about Danish cultural context doesn't hold water either. Denmark has its own charged political discourse around Middle Eastern and African immigrants. And DHH has lived in the US for roughly 20 years so he's well aware of how these discussions are perceived. As for the Anglo-Saxon history lesson: they were themselves migrants who mixed with existing populations. London was founded by Romans (also migrants!) and has been a multicultural trading hub for over a thousand years. What "native British" golden age is DHH mourning exactly? The 1950s? The Victorian era built on colonial extraction? When precisely was London purely "native British"?
> So now we have recognizable 'native Brits' who look different from modern day 'native Italians' or 'native Germans'.
I'd be curious to hear more about these supposedly "recognizable" distinctions. This sounds remarkably similar to certain early 20th century anthropological theories that we've since... reconsidered.