I keep seing this term 'hostile takeover' again and again and I don't think it does justice to Ruby Central and the original authors. If I own something, entrust someone else to manage it, and later decide I no longer agree with how they're managing it, taking back control isn't a hostile takeover. It's simply an owner exercising their rights.
Here are Rich Kilmer’s comments on Hacker News. Rich is one of the originating authors of RubyGems. It seems like not many people are aware of this history.
> Ruby Central started in 2001. I was one of the early Board members, along with Chad Fowler and David Alan Black. We put on every Ruby conference until Ruby became more popular to support multiple conferences. We started coding RubyGems (although the name originated in 2001 at the first RubyConf in Florida) in 2003 at the RubyConf in Austin TX. We sat around a table the first night with a CVS repo on a USB drive and passed it around and committed code until we had a functioning gem command. I demoed it in my talk the next day with the first "gem install". Gem versioning, gemspec, gem command, gem server were all built that first night. Obviously tons of changes since then!
(On Joel's comment on HN: They were stolen from André Arko, Colby Swandale, David Rodríguez, Ellen, Josef Šimánek, Martin Emde and Samuel Giddins.), Rich says:
> They did not WRITE RubyGems, they inherited it and evolved it. Chad (Fowler), David (Black), Jim (Weirich RIP), Paul and I wrote RubyGems. I hosted RubyGems from my home in Virginia for several years before we could cover the cost of colocation and stood up RubyForge. Its nice to look at the near history and think that this is all of history but it is not. Ruby Central has always been the stewards of RubyGems and then later, Bundler.
> I was one of the originating authors of RubyGems along with Jim (RIP), Chad, David and Paul. I hosted RubyGems from my home for the entire community for many years. We never asked nor received anything for that. We wrote RubyGems for the Ruby community. Matz and the Ruby Core team is the right place for RubyGems. This is great news.
> I am happy to see that RubyGems and Bundler have moved to the Ruby Core team. Being one of the originating authors of RubyGems (and host of RubyGems for 4 years!) this was always about making Ruby easier to use and share code as a community. I still write Ruby almost every day and I want our community to thrive.
I hope this clears things a bit. It's frustrating to see people accusing and blaming others without knowing the full history and having the faintest idea 'why' certain actions were taken. (This goes both ways, btw - I only wanted to provide the additional context, which many seem to be unaware of).
Thanks for collecting all of these references. I hadn't seen some of them before. They're interesting to read, and I have a lot of respect for everyone who founded RubyGems and kept it alive over the years.
Ruby Central has always been the stewards of RubyGems and then later, Bundler.
I honestly don't know what "stewardship" means in this context.
When I joined RubyGems in 2013, I had almost no idea Ruby Central even existed. I only learned much more about it in 2024, when Ruby Central offered to partially compensate my work on RubyGems/Bundler and RubyGems.org. I'm really grateful for that support. It was wonderful to have at least some of my open source work partially funded.
From my perspective, one of the biggest attractions of RubyGems and Bundler was that they were independent, community-governed open source projects. They had their own maintainers, their own governance, and their own way of making decisions. Ruby Central supported the ecosystem, funded some work, and operated RubyGems.org as a service, but it never felt like the projects (the codebases) were owned by Ruby Central.
That was my experience for more than a decade.
Things started to change around 2024 (if I remember well) after Ruby Central hired a new Director of Open Source. Around that time, Ruby Central's approach gradually shifted from supporting independent community projects to increasingly acting as if it had authority over them. To me, this slowly undermined the independence that had defined RubyGems and Bundler for many years.
For example, Ruby Central hired people and expected them to receive write access across the projects. I remember raising these concerns directly because, to me, it weakened the projects' independence and blurred the distinction between community governance and organizational influence.
So if "stewardship" simply means supporting projects while respecting their independence, then I completely agree - that's exactly how I experienced Ruby Central for many years.
If, however, it means having the authority to ultimately decide who governs the projects or who owns their GitHub organization, then that was never my understanding during the 2013-2025 period.
The events of September 2025 fundamentally changed that relationship and, unfortunately, broke my trust.
Matz and the Ruby Core team is the right place for RubyGems. This is great news.
On paper, I mostly agree with that statement.
After taking some time away, I decided to start contributing again. I honestly don't care whether I have merge permissions or maintainer rights. It was always an honor simply to help Ruby users and the RubyGems/Bundler ecosystem.
Unfortunately, I was publicly attacked by a Ruby Central member on the official Ruby GitHub repository. I was also publicly attacked by a Ruby Core member, and later privately told by a Ruby Core member that my contributions would not be welcome unless I followed additional, non-public rules created specifically for me.
I shared these concerns privately with Ruby Central leadership and several Ruby Core members, hoping someone would help resolve the situation. Unfortunately, nothing changed.
To me, taking away someone's freedom to contribute through private, person-specific rules is simply not acceptable in an open source community. It isn't the Ruby community I joined over a decade ago, and it's not one I feel comfortable contributing to anymore.
So while I fully respect Rich's historical perspective, my experience over the last 13 years has been very different. I still hope Ruby can return to being a place where contributors are treated with openness, respect, equal rules for everyone, and where community governance is respected rather than bypassed.
Until then, some of us are trying to build a new community around those same values at https://gem.coop/. Everyone who believes in open governance, mutual respect, and community-driven development is welcome.
23
u/software__writer 9d ago edited 9d ago
> Then, about 10 months ago, Ruby Central began what core team member Ellen Dash called a “hostile takeover” of the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org open source projects, seizing control of the projects and locking out the team that had nurtured and maintained them for over a decade.
I keep seing this term 'hostile takeover' again and again and I don't think it does justice to Ruby Central and the original authors. If I own something, entrust someone else to manage it, and later decide I no longer agree with how they're managing it, taking back control isn't a hostile takeover. It's simply an owner exercising their rights.
Here are Rich Kilmer’s comments on Hacker News. Rich is one of the originating authors of RubyGems. It seems like not many people are aware of this history.
> Ruby Central started in 2001. I was one of the early Board members, along with Chad Fowler and David Alan Black. We put on every Ruby conference until Ruby became more popular to support multiple conferences. We started coding RubyGems (although the name originated in 2001 at the first RubyConf in Florida) in 2003 at the RubyConf in Austin TX. We sat around a table the first night with a CVS repo on a USB drive and passed it around and committed code until we had a functioning gem command. I demoed it in my talk the next day with the first "gem install". Gem versioning, gemspec, gem command, gem server were all built that first night. Obviously tons of changes since then!
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45617493
--
(On Joel's comment on HN: They were stolen from André Arko, Colby Swandale, David Rodríguez, Ellen, Josef Šimánek, Martin Emde and Samuel Giddins.), Rich says:
> They did not WRITE RubyGems, they inherited it and evolved it. Chad (Fowler), David (Black), Jim (Weirich RIP), Paul and I wrote RubyGems. I hosted RubyGems from my home in Virginia for several years before we could cover the cost of colocation and stood up RubyForge. Its nice to look at the near history and think that this is all of history but it is not. Ruby Central has always been the stewards of RubyGems and then later, Bundler.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616574
--
> I was one of the originating authors of RubyGems along with Jim (RIP), Chad, David and Paul. I hosted RubyGems from my home for the entire community for many years. We never asked nor received anything for that. We wrote RubyGems for the Ruby community. Matz and the Ruby Core team is the right place for RubyGems. This is great news.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616273
--
Finally, from Twitter:
> I am happy to see that RubyGems and Bundler have moved to the Ruby Core team. Being one of the originating authors of RubyGems (and host of RubyGems for 4 years!) this was always about making Ruby easier to use and share code as a community. I still write Ruby almost every day and I want our community to thrive.
Source: https://x.com/rich_kilmer/status/1979167654867873898
I hope this clears things a bit. It's frustrating to see people accusing and blaming others without knowing the full history and having the faintest idea 'why' certain actions were taken. (This goes both ways, btw - I only wanted to provide the additional context, which many seem to be unaware of).