RubyGems Fracture Incident Report(rubycentral.org) |
RubyGems Fracture Incident Report(rubycentral.org) |
As I understand it, Ruby Central controlled the rubygems and bundler github organizations, but did not "own" the projects in the traditional sense - the individual contributers have copyright on the code, and potentially even trademark rights. By then removing access of core maintainers to those projects, they removed access to something they don't "own" themselves.
This is all complicated by the fact that controlling a github organization or repo is different from owning the trademark or copyright. But some of the original maintainers clearly felt they had more of a right to those projects than Ruby Central did.
I believe not clarifying this before making these access changes was the biggest mistake that Ruby Central made, and it's not even mentioned in this report.
The takeaway for the rest of is that separation of such concerns isn’t an abstract notion but needs to be reflected in the mechanical implementation of organisations, lest you get a train wreck later when perspectives don’t align and the whole picture crumbles.
This was never in dispute from the two parties. Ruby Central and "the maintainers" agreed from the beginning that it was collateral damage. The disagreement was what that meant and what to do with it. Hence the Sept 10 message from the Ruby Central Committee that they should move it to the Ruby core org (which IMO is long overdue).
The original plan (by the oss committee)was to move bundler to the Ruby org, that's what happened. When it did, the community generally like it (on HN and reddit comments).
They're not the original authors of Rubygems so it's doubtful they have anything more than copyright on the code they contributed.
This incident involved many people over a rather long time scale, and it was important to detangle how people perceived events from how they actually unfolded. The subject matter is deeply subjective, and multiple failed attempts at writing this doc came as a result of aiming for objectivity, for blameless representation. Therefore, those named in this report are:
- Full-time employees of Ruby Central
- Part-time consultants who were involved in access discussions
- Anyone who made an access change from September 10th-18th, 2025
- Those who have already been publicly identified in the discourse
Volunteer groups, including the Ruby Central Board and the Open Source Software (OSS) Committee, are listed, but their actions are represented as a group. Individual quotes from the OSS Committee are used without direct attribution when they represent a general consensus.
Some execution failures and mistakes are individual, but the purpose of having a foundation and having an institution is that it can rise above individual limitations and provide robust, fault-tolerant systems. Therefore, these are our mistakes, collectively. And collectively we'll learn from them, but only if we face what happened, what we meant to do, and where we fell short.
The hope is that by sharing this, we can provide some closure to the community and increase transparency
By their own admission, André is a contractor to Ruby Central. Contractors, especially under California law, have no contractual obligation of confidentiality to the other party unless there's a pre-existing agreement in place. They later admit in this "incident report" that they didn't have any legal agreements with André in place, so there's no basis for claiming André couldn't work on rv.
Samuel was an employee, not a contractor, but [California Bus. & Prof. Code § 16600](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....) voids non-compete agreements—so even as an employee, he had every right to work on a competing project. There's no indication that he used Ruby Central's proprietary information to do so, and the report doesn't allege that. I have little doubt that if Samuel or André used proprietary information to develop rv, they would have already presented evidence of that.
Independent of the legalese, a "uv but for ruby" is a blindingly obvious thing to do, and Ruby Central doesn't get to lick the cookie and get upset when an independent contractor—Ruby Central's own characterization—does a thing they didn't fund.
My sourcing on this is that I run a 10-person business with employees in California. I'm not a lawyer, but I looked over enough of this paperwork that I feel confident opining on an internet forum.
You'll have to take me on my word about it...but if I saw this as a driver of the issue I would have included it. I think saying "shopify was involved" is sort of like saying "people talked about RV at Rails World." Shopify is huge and hugely invested in Ruby's OSS ecosystem. I have my own critiques of the company, but not here. I think they're a net positive for Ruby OSS. I wish the general response was "more companies need to step up, I'll go talk to my leadership" rather than knocking these volunteers for their involvement. I've said elsewhere that if I were in the committee or in their shoes...I don't think the outcome would have been different (even if details would have). Also, you are welcome to disagree and have a different opinion.
I agree that it's best not to have situations like this. PSF bylaws "Section 5.15. Limits on Co-affiliation of Board Members." and similar rules are generally good at preventing the perception of conflict of interest (which is also important...that the perception alone can be damaging).
Right now, the committee is 100% one company (me). Because I'm the only one on it. Which is also a problem. Also, we're in a rebuilding/re-prioritizing phase with all of this...so it's hard to onboard while things are in flux.
Mike works at Basecamp (now and then). Based on comms I don't believe any of them acted on behalf of their employer i.e. no "team orders." Or if they did, they did so in ways that aligned with my perception of what I believed to be the correct read of the situation.
I also think that we (as humans) are much less incapable of knowing what things sway and influence our opinions than we think. We are much less capable of correcting for conflicts of interest than we would like. The study "tappers and listeners" is about adjusting for knowledge (curse of knowledge), but I think it applies to influence as well. Which is to say...I'm sure that everyone was influenced in many ways, but I felt they acted as individuals and reacted in real time.
There are other details of affiliations that I omitted from the former maintainers as well, that are true to state, and likely had some impact on their decisions ... but I used judgment to omit what I didn't think was fair or didn't think was immediately relevant. Not saying I got it all right all the time, but sort of chiming in to say "I'm not only omitting information in favor of one party." Yes, I'm biased...but I'm trying to correct for that bias. (A funny thing to state after just saying humans are bad at it, I know).
My biggest takeaway from this is the intermingling of opensource work/foundations/companies and employees/contractors/volunteers needs to be incredibly explicit. It sounds like everyone had very different expectations about what this group of people was (ranging from an exclusive club of influential ruby developers to a very formal, business-like foundation) and, as a result, each other's actions seemed hostile/strange/confusing.
[1] I actually think the comments about the proposal of selling the user data does a disservice to the postmortem. I think it invokes a much more emotional reaction from the reader than anything else and, while potentially interesting, seems like dirty laundry that doesn't change the lesson the postmortem teaches.
As far as arguments about community, Shopify IS the community by virtue of being the ones putting up pretty much all the money to keep this ship afloat.
If you don't have skin in the game your positions won't be taken seriously.
Depending on your point of view, Sidekiq either turned their back on the community or tried to start a coup by pulling funding just so they could morally grandstand.
Andre's removal is easily justifiable by his own (lengthy history of) sketchy behavior.
Since when is "open source" something businesses shouldn't be allowed to get value from or even have a stake in? These things are MIT licensed. That's free as in speech AND beer. If you don't like the freedoms of the license and how other people use them, don't use the license. If you don't like someone's stewardship, fork and maintain your own.
I seem to remember there were some threats of legal action related to unauthorized access after this kerfuffle but I a) don't know what is going on with that, b) don't know what the law actually says about that and c) don't know if that is what you are referring to. If so, I think it is different than what the original comment alleged which was more about moonlighting/using proprietary information/competing. I think that topic is extremely complicated (e.g. I am not so sure moonlighting for a competitor while an employee is necessarily protected in California...) but that wasn't alleged in the postmortem anyway.
> The document didn't mention a lawsuit and I was just responding to the above comment with only the context of the postmortem and pointing out that this particular article didn't claim anything illegal happened.
You are correct that they did not make any claims, but the article did insinuate illegal behavior on the part of André and Samuel by selectively juxtaposing facts to imply wrongdoing without ever directly stating or saying that their behavior was illegal. For example:
1. André's first commit on RV is placed on the same bullet point as the Ruby Central-funded maintainer offsite, which implies Ruby Central's travel money subsidized a competing project's creation. 2. The `rubygems-github-backup` access token covering "all repos, including private repos" is introduced in the same timeline section as RV development, without any allegation it was used for RV. 3. The "Incident Lessons" section recommends adding an "Outside Business Activities" declaration policy, which only reads as a "lesson" if André's undisclosed side project is being framed as the problem in need of remediation. 4. The report states André "had intimate knowledge of the foundation roadmap" and "did not tell anyone in Ruby Central about this work until it launched". This frames nondisclosure of a lawful side project as a transgression. However, Ruby Central passed on this work, and even if they didn't, André has no obligation to tell Ruby Central about his work! 5. André's proposal to have his consultancy analyze RubyGems.org download logs is presented alongside an OSS Committee member raising PII and "reputational risk" concerns, casting a perfectly sensible rejected business proposal as something suspect.
By my count, Ruby Central makes roughly 10 insinuations throughout the report, but not once do they actually claim any of these constitute a transgression.
> I think that topic is extremely complicated (e.g. I am not so sure moonlighting for a competitor while an employee is necessarily protected in California...)
California is actually quite clear on this! Bus. & Prof. Code § 16600 voids non-compete agreements, and California courts have consistently read it broadly enough that working on a competing project during employment is protected. The line is whether you used your employer's proprietary information or resources to do it, not whether you competed. The report does not allege that Samuel or André used Ruby Central's proprietary information, and given how thoroughly they documented everything else, I'd expect them to have said so if they had evidence of it. Ruby Central is insinuating that working on RV in the first place is a problem, not that they crossed any legal or contractual line.
> You are correct that they did not make any claims, but the article did insinuate illegal behavior on the part of André and Samuel by selectively juxtaposing facts to imply wrongdoing without ever directly stating or saying that their behavior was illegal.
I think we just took away something very different from the article. I didn't read it that way, I read it more as "these two have already decided to move on to work on this without Ruby Central so it's pragmatic to cut off their access". We might just need to agree to disagree on what the article implies; perhaps we are just reading it with different boundary conditions.
Where we might agree is that repeatedly bringing up the selling user data proposal doesn't add anything to the story except to prejudice the reader against Andre. If it's to show that there was still some communication between Andre and others at Ruby Central, I would have kept it at that. Every time it got mentioned I winced.
> California is actually quite clear on this!
My understanding is quite different. There is a duty of loyalty an employee owes their employer and directly competing with your employer is clearly a breach. There is recent enough case law on this (at least covering terminating an employee for cause as a result). I don't have access to the materials from a previous employer that explained some of this but I did quickly find [1] which roughly agrees with my recollection (though I would not be willing to vouch for this particular site), namely "that Section 16600 has consistently been interpreted as invalidating any employment agreement that unreasonably interferes with an employee’s ability to compete with an employer _after_ his or her employment ends".
I'm not a lawyer (I assume you aren't either but at the very least you aren't _my_ lawyer) so I think it's not worth debating this further, we seem pretty firm in our beliefs on this one.
[1] https://www.aalrr.com/Business-Law-Journal/californias-polic...
EDIT: I want to acknowledge that one of the individuals here was a contractor and not an employee. I have no idea how that factors into moonlighting restrictions. I imagine it would be more limited and lean more on what that individual's exact role is at the company? I think my point still stands that my understanding is that the general situation for the average software engineer is more nuanced.
I think the RubyGems fiasco was a result of unresolved tensions. People chose not to be adults about and resolve the issues respectfully. IMHO, I think one of the main problems is that nobody was willing to spin up a core foundation to own critical infrastructure to the Ruby community which remains a problem.
I cannot find the blogposts I remember reading, but recall that there were some bad feelings about Ruby Together and Arko’s leadership of it before it was merged with Ruby Central. It appears these feelings never went away which is made very clear by the way that key Shopify engineers started posting after Ruby Central took over the RubyGems GitHub org [1].
Now combine this with dhh’s right-wing political posts and behavior, his extremely close relationship with the founder of Shopify (dhh is on the board of Shopify), a key Ruby Central donor pulling critical funding because he did not want his money going towards giving dhh more attention and you’re left with Ruby Central effectively being controlled by Shopify (which, as far as I can tell is still the situation) because that’s where all of its funding comes from now.
Frankly, the biggest thing this entire fiasco has shown me is that a lot of us are still a bunch of idiotic teenagers. Integrity and maturity is in short supply where it is needed the most.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/rmfranca.bsky.social/post/3lz7alpob...
This is one of the biggest ones that I remember:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180420220652/https://samphippe...
Yes, I do. All hardware and bandwidth are donated by Fastly and AWS so it costs RC nothing. Their expenses were $20,000/mo for 24/7 ops coverage: $2000/mo for 6 people and $8000/mo for service maintenance (e.g. db and software upgrades). So $240,000/yr, not "millions".
Shopify paying for infrastructure related to Ruby is an investment, not charity. Hosting gems costs money and a healthy community depends on that gem hosting. Spotify, in turn, depends on that healthy community to produce and maintain gems, train future employees, stuff like that. They’re not paying that money for fun, it is to protect their interests.
And all of the above would be true even if the OSS committee wasn’t 100% Shopify affiliated. That’s gravy.
You can't unilaterally declare someone "sketchy" and then kick them out in the name of conveience.
People having concerns about Andre's behavior around his money and his open source contributions can't even be called an open secret.
The narrative that one side of this is pushing that this is some little guys vs evil corporate overlords problem is short-circuiting so many peoples' ability to rationalize about this topic.
This is about the personal failings to communicate and organize among a very small group of highly skilled, highly productive people. It's also about how they have fallen into camps and try to apply institutional and social leverage in order to influence millions of bystanders in order to maintain/wrest control. Each credibly accusing the other of doing it for their own benefit.
Nobody is in the right here. If you can't engage with that as your starting point, you aren't serious about this conversation and are just spouting one side's propaganda.
In the aftermath us bystanders are left wanting either stability or revolution. Revolutions generally aren't good for anyone. Especially the people who want it the most.
Not an accurate characterization.
There are some people who do feel this way. But it's not everyone, by a long shot.
You are right that this ten year long interpersonal beef is ultimately at the root of all of this.
It appears unfair. That's the extent of my rationale. I've not seen any concrete evidence to draw any further conclusion than this. If you're managing a project and you're not cognizant of this, you probably shouldn't be managing projects; in particular, you should stay away from open source projects with a large base of volunteer contributors.
> Nobody is in the right here.
So, they went through all of this, made themselves look bad, cast tons of aspersions, and in the end, they weren't even in the right? This seems a shabby defense.
> are just spouting one side's propaganda.
I don't care about one side or the other. You see this giant crater left by these decisions though? Yea.. that's the problem.
I've known him personally for years and find him perfectly fine as a person. The Rubygems maintainers worked with him for the past decade without issue. Until you cite actual issues, not vague "concerns", you're just spreading FUD and innuendo.
I think it's fairer to say that if you know him and you are in the community than you know that these opinions of him are had. That is not normal.
I also want to make it clear that there is a separation here. I do not think that Andre is a malicious or bad person. I just have questions about his decision-making based on things he's said & actions that he's taken and that leads me to think that he is untrustworthy. Not in the "will steal from me" sense but in the "will fuck up shit that I care about" sense (which ultimately he did, at least partly, whether through direct actions or poorly maintained relationships with key people). I work with this kind of infrastructure though and that's the kind of attitude that you want to have towards people to be able to do this job effectively. I don't trust a lot of people -- I want any access they have to be out in the open, limited to what's needed, etc. Governance of the project/organization was obviously a shit-show.
When I say that it's obvious to cut ties with him, I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone responsible for a high-profile project. I would make that decision 10 times out of 10 without regret. They still absolutely bungled the crap out of how that went down.
Also, I hate that this crap gets associated with the "Ruby Community". It's really just a subset of the western Ruby ecosystem that cares about foundations and events and semi-social functions. Ruby's core and a whole ecosystem of people working on and around Ruby couldn't give a crap about any of this and it's all just a massive inconvenience. Meanwhile on boards like this everyone is planting their flags and trying to exploit chaos to create change in critical services that people absolutely depend on.
Don't pretend like I'm some nutter flinging wild accusations when primary and secondary actors in this story literally voiced these concerns in emails during this event.
Anyone who has been following this saga and actually cares knows because they read it already.
1) Hyperbolic takes on a perceived 'communication problem' when Andre defends strong design decisions that have impacts on the Ruby ecosystem. Anyone doing what Andre does is going to have impacts on the ecosystem, that is the point. I think the ease of maintaining Ruby systems speaks to the overall good outcomes these discussions have had, and Andre's part in them.
2) Personal dislike of Andre due to disagreements over politics and/or worldviews, usually stemming from assertions of 'woke code' or something like that.
3) Distaste over Andre trying to make a living off doing what they love. This is usually couched in the 'shady' type language you have used a few times. I think that is a weird take on what are just common schemes to use data for monetization purposes, so that Andre can make a living doing design and maintenance. Nothing I have ever seen makes me worried for my data in Bundler or Rubygems.
If your main concern is that 'bad things could happen with Andre running Bundler' I have to question if it isn't just as likely, if not more likely, that bad things will happen with a Shopify run RC board running Bundler. Their motivations are much less clear other than being a corporation that is profit driven, so I can't say with confidence they won't put that motive above 'good software decisions' when push comes to shove. I don't see them as de-facto making the Ruby supply chain better by any means. Time will tell.