If you’re in the Ruby world you may have been following the RubyGems shenanigans of the last few weeks. They suffered a poorly communicated corporate led rug-pull, not all that dissimilar to the games Perforce has played over the last year or so. Amusingly, they also claimed it was for security purposes without providing any actual rationale supporting that claim.
As you can guess, this caused a lot of consternation, especially in projects like OpenVox based on Ruby and in companies like Overlook InfraTech whose livelihood depends on Ruby.
You may want to read that last bit again. This heavily impacts companies whose livelihoods depend on Ruby.
Ah. Now that’s the root of the problem, isn’t it? There aren’t enough companies financially supporting the projects they’ve built their own businesses on top of. For example, Puppetserver would not be possible without JRuby and yet Puppet/Perforce didn’t bother helping the project through its funding crisis until they were publicly named and shamed and it became a PR problem for them.
We don’t believe in doing business that way and we now have an opportunity to live up to our ideals. The original RubyGems team has announced a community led and governed gem server. This means that we now have the opportunity to help build a new ecosystem that’s not supported and dominated by a single company out of touch with its community.
They don’t currently have a way to sponsor the project, so we are using GitHub
Sponsors to throw down $100USD monthly for each of the current developer team.
We encourage you and/or your employers to do the same by clicking the {sponsor}
icon on each of these GitHub profiles.
Here’s to a better and more resilient Ruby ecosystem going forward!