RubyGems takeover
I myself do not use Ruby Gems or have interacted with Ruby Central but the spirit of open source has been destroyed by Ruby Central and Shopify because of the recent hostile overtake of the RubyGems project which involves removing 10+ year long maintainers. Keep in mind, this is my TLDR and a personal blog. Please do your own research!
What is RubyGems?
Ruby Gems is a package manager. If you’re familiar with Arch think about installing using yay. Ruby Gems helps you find, install, and publish packages. So imagine someone completely overtaking the community driven and contributed repository of packages in the AUR.
Who is Ruby Central?
A non-profit organization whose mission is to support Ruby. Shopify is a major funder of Ruby Central and demanded that Ruby Central takeover the Ruby Gems project due to safety and stability for their clients. They have now removed all maintainers and it is now under only one owner.
Why does this matter
This is not the first time this has happened. Corporations continually disrespect the spirit of open source. You cannot close source something that has been built up by the community. They cannot be entitled to something they do not OWN. They are essentially saying, “Hey, I know you all worked really hard and contributed your time and love to this thing but we’re taking it away!” Everyone could have been given notice at the very least.
Looking forward
I wonder if there is a possibility to improve legal representation within the open source community to uphold the licenses. Unfortunately, Shopify will probably get away with this because of the lack of knowledge about the open source community and it’s effects on the greater whole of engineering. I personally think that involvement in the open source community is a privilege (at this current state in society at least) due to everyone wanting their tech to be accessible or just work because it’s just a means to an end. If there is more awareness and knowledge, corporations are less likely to do this or may not consider due to backlash.
Resources
- Joel Drapper’s article of RubyGems
- Ellen’s account (RubyGems Maintainer)
- A board members take on what happened (still vague)