zlacker

I don't know about this interpretation. The blog post points out that one of the conditions of the continued funding by Shopify was literally removing one of the specific maintainers of the stolen tooling who had been working on it them for a decade, and it provided ample evidence that this was funding that essentially was the only thing keeping the service afloat. It's kind of hard to imagine threatening to sink the entire RubyGems service unless the people in charge of it steal ownership of a related but separately owned tool to force out one specific person as "good intentions" but with "poor communication" when it's presented the way it has been by the perpetrators.

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based similarly on a relationship with a single person, there are two pretty crucial differences: the funding was withdrawn because of the relationship the organization had itself with someone, rather than someone involved with something that literally had to be stolen to terminate their involvement, and the funding withdrawn by Sidekiq was done openly with umambiguously communicated intentions.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.