Kicked from RubyGems, maintainers forge new home at Gem Cooperative
- Reference: 1759755619
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/10/06/gem_cooperative/
- Source link:
Martin Emde, one of the previous maintainers, [2]said Ruby developers can immediately switch to the new server, although publishing gems is not yet possible. Gems (packages for Ruby) published to RubyGems.org are immediately available from gem.coop. The [3]team includes Ellen Dash, whose post last month was the first to report on the maintainer crisis.
Governance for the cooperative is a work in progress, which Emde said will be released later this week. Mike McQuaid, project lead of Homebrew, a Mac package manager written in Ruby, is assisting with this. McQuaid previously [4]attempted to mediate (without success) between the maintainers and Ruby Central, the organization that hosts RubyGems and decided to remove external maintainers from the project.
[5]
The creation of the Gem Cooperative follows an [6]open letter calling for Rails, the popular application framework for Ruby, to be forked in order to free the project from its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, because of what the letter claims are his "racist and transphobic views."
[7]
[8]
Signatories to the open letter, called Plan Vert, include Tim Bray (co-author of the XML specification), Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse.org), and Eugen Rochko (creator of the Mastodon decentralized social network). Mastodon is built with Ruby on Rails.
Hansson opposed the letter on X, [9]calling it "this dumb letter" that was "never going to go anywhere," among other comments and retweets on the subject.
[10]Open source to closed doors: RubyGems control fight erupts
[11]RubyGems maintainer quits after Ruby Central takes control of project
[12]RubyGems now requires multi-factor auth for top package maintainers
[13]RubyGems polishes security practices with multi-factor authentication push
Shan Cureton, executive director of Ruby Central, [14]posted about why the organization had acted to take full control over key Ruby code repositories including RubyGems and Bundler (a widely used package dependency manager), claiming it was done for security reasons.
"Ruby Central is responsible for the security, maintenance, and availability of the RubyGems services... to meet that duty of care, privileged access and operational decisions must align under a single, accountable stewardship model from codebase to production," Cureton wrote.
[15]
Joel Drapper, formerly of Shopify (a key sponsor of Ruby Central), [16]stated that "the takeover of the RubyGems GitHub organization and gems was not required to meet Ruby Central's legal obligations... Ruby Central was in full control of what source code it deployed to the RubyGems.org Service which it operated." He added that claiming ownership of open source code because you operate a service that runs it is "like claiming you own Rails because you have a Rails app."
André Arko, another excluded maintainer who worked for 15 years on Bundler and founded Ruby Together (now merged with Ruby Central), said: "In the last few weeks, Ruby Central has suddenly asserted that they alone own Bundler. That simply isn't true." Arko [17]said that he owns the Bundler trademark and will not license it, though "Ruby Central is welcome to the code, just like everyone else." Arko intends to transfer the trademark in future to a Ruby organization that is "accountable to the community." ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/25/open_source_to_closed_doors/
[2] https://martinemde.com/2025/10/05/announcing-gem-coop.html
[3] https://github.com/gem-coop
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/22/ruby_central_rubygems/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/devops&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aOPnm4ivXdVjOxp83XAn_gAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://github.com/Plan-Vert/open-letter
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/devops&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aOPnm4ivXdVjOxp83XAn_gAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/devops&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aOPnm4ivXdVjOxp83XAn_gAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://x.com/dhh/status/1971240387265413324
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/25/open_source_to_closed_doors/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/22/ruby_central_rubygems/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/16/rubygems_package_registry_mfa/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/16/rubygems_mfa_security/
[14] https://rubycentral.org/news/our-stewardship-where-we-are-whats-changing-and-how-well-engage/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/devops&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aOPnm4ivXdVjOxp83XAn_gAAAMs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
[17] https://andre.arko.net/2025/09/25/bundler-belongs-to-the-ruby-community/
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: FAFO
On the bright side, not being at all subtle about the snatch means that now everyone knows what Ruby Central are up to.
Re: FAFO
Do you really think all the devs are working for free?
The woke mob
I actually read the posts by DHH which were supposed to be racist and transphobic. I found nothing to disagree with.
"Educating" primary school children about transsexuality is inappropriate to say the least. They're not old enough to understand the issues and are at a very impressionable age.
It is a problem that just 1/3 of the population of London are native Brits.
The woke mob is out to destroy the man's career just because he spoke the truth. This is wokeism at its absolute worst.
Re: The woke mob
"Educating" primary school children about transsexuality is inappropriate to say the least. They're not old enough to understand the issues and are at a very impressionable age.
We endeavour, correctly and successfully, to teach primary school children English grammar, basic set theory and the rules of association football. Compared to all of these things "Some people are much happier if they live their lives as the opposite sex" is really not terribly complicated, and it ranks about 73rd in the list of "Weird Things About The World Which Children Ought To Know".
It is a problem that just 1/3 of the population of London are native Brits.
Around 59% of Londoners were born in the UK. I shudder to imagine what you mean by "native Brits".
Re: The woke mob
Define "native Brits"
I ask, because I strongly suspect the answer you give will include a group that were at some point in the past immigrants. How far back you need to go is just a matter of degree really. The whole "native Brits" thing is just a racist dog whistle. And I say this as someone who has a British ancestry of at least a few hundred years. Britain has been invaded so many times it's funny, and it built an empire specifically to import the products and peoples of the places it conquered. There is no point, except relatively recently, that "native Brits" was a thing. The British are, and always have been, whoever holds a British Passport. London is certainly not 2/3rds populated by people who do not hold a British passport, therefore the idea that it is only 1/3rd "native Brits" is absurd.
If your definition is "Anglo Saxon" then I hate to break it to you but the Angles and the Saxons were both immigrant groups. As were the Picts, the Celts, the Scots, and the Normans.
Educating primary school children about transsexuality is also an argument I hear a lot that the people making it fail to state what exactly it is they object too, I suspect they do this because they are trying to skirt over the fact that what primary school children are being educated about is "sometimes people are different, and that's ok" but they want to present the idea that kids are being told it's ok to undergo surgery, but that's definitely not in the curriculum. If you object to Children being told it's OK to be themselves, then the problem isn't transsexuality, it's you.
Re: The woke mob
"that were at some point in the past immigrants"
People get all upset when you say that Native Americans are actually from Asia.
So for reference David Heinemeier Hansson is Danish. He's not a Brit. He's not a gammon.
"Britain has been invaded so many times it's funny"
As has the entirety of Europe. Actually more so as the UK has been relatively free of invaders for about the last 1000 years. But the various peoples of Europe all seem to be able to take pride in their nationality and history without the accusations of racism. We all forget that the French, Dutch and Spanish had empires and the French still retain the leftovers of theirs. It was not the English who devastated South America.
"Educating primary school children about"
The most common complaint is the source material that schools, predominantly in the USA, use for this 'education' is essentially p0rn. There is also significant evidence that children, especially girls with autism, are being told that the reason they have issues fitting in or coping with their changing bodies is that they are really the opposite sex and that transition will help them.
Another issue that parents have is the focus on fetish and kink. There has been a huge increase in the number of cases of SA involving choking.
"the idea that kids are being told it's ok to undergo surgery"
Well, its true that kids ARE undergoing surgery. One doctor loved to tictok about 'yeeting teets' of teenage girls and would show off the 'leftovers'. Some of this is more down to parents with serious mental health issues, not just the kids.
Why should people care about this guy's political opinions?
They are using software, not marrying him.
I don't care if people wander round at the weekend dressed as Hitler, believe the world is flat or even support Man City. Each to their own. Doesn't stop me buying things from them or selling things to them.
It's a diverse world out there. If you want to entirely isolate yourself from people who don't think the way you do, you are going to have a weird life.
FAFO
Open source 1, VCs 0