Why I'm declining funding from Ruby Together | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm declining funding from Ruby Together

samphippen.com

178 pointsjrochkind136 comments

Something is obviously broken for a prominent contributor to the ruby community to decline funding from Ruby Together, regardless of the cause or reasoning.

So sad to see this drama arise in the ruby community, but sometimes there are no other option. I commend those who tried to resolve the issues quietly having the resolve to stand up for what they believe is right, even if it rocks the boat.

Why is it always Ruby? Why does the Ruby Community in general get much more drama then anywhere else.

I am convinced a certain Programming languages and stack as well as Open Sources License attract certain type of people. And these people who are attracted to Ruby seems to cause more drama then the norm.

Coraline Ada Ehmke.

As a recent victim of André's petty wrath, I completely agree with the sentiment

Care to elaborate a bit?

I apparently violated the Bundler CoC by disagreeing with their implementation of --jobs <n> that actually runs n - 1 jobs. When I questioned what I had actually violated, he accused me of making a joke about racism and blocked me. https://twitter.com/swrobel/status/984894874330656768

"codes of conduct" are a net negative and a blight on open source repos. If you maintain a repo, please don't fall to that scam. Not surprised he behaved that way.

I would've disagreed with you a few months back, but now seeing how a CoC can be pulled out as a catch-all to silence anyone who disagrees with you, I'm firmly in your camp.

I don't use a CoC on any of my projects, but I would have reacted similarly to your comments. My issue tracker isn't your personal place to vent unconstructive frustration. Reframing this is as simply shutting down disagreement (which happens all the time in my issue trackers quite peacefully) is just plain disingenuous.

I'm trying hard to follow what is happening on that twitter thread.

Can you put your joke here? I don't see any jokes or mention of race anywhere on your Twitter.

Yeah, sorry, I will try to make a long story short.

For years I've had Bundler set to just run jobs equal to the number of cores on my system. However, I noticed it was running one less so I assumed I was doing something wrong. After hours of banging my head against the wall, I finally found that it Bundler subtracts 1 from the number of jobs you pass to it, but this behavior has been removed from master (for eventual 2.x branch). A bit irate, I engaged in the following exchange w/ Andre, in which he accused me of violating their CoC for posting a bit of a kneejerk comment, which I apologized for, but questioned what I possibly could've violated in the CoC, in the process making a wisecrack about the ridiculous term in it about "making casual references to slavery or indentured servitude." Anyway, if you really want to dig in, here's the github thread:

https://github.com/bundler/bundler/pull/5808#issuecomment-38...

In the end, he banned me (it says 24 hrs in his comment, but it seems permanent) which has now prevented me from submitting a PR to document the very "feature" that threw me into this rage to begin with. Way to run an OSS project!

I think his response, except for the ban, was appropriate

Was part of his response that he doesn't need the money of someone who makes racial jokes? Good riddance? That's a pretty strong statement to make over Twitter, esp. since if you read through the whole thing, that's someone trying to forcefully make a suggestion about racial insensitivity, which is at best journalistic twisting.

What irks me about such responses is that it's not your prerogative to retract anything you say about anyone over the internet. It might not even be your prerogative to correct any of your statements.

agreed, it's the ban I take issue with. felt pretty power-trippy to me.

I wonder if your 24 hour ban became permanent because of the Twitter post.

That sucks because you can see how close this issue was to being quashed when you ~90% apologized.

not losing any sleep about it, although I really can't comprehend why, as an OSS maintainer, you want to reduce your pool of contributors over something so petty.

Oh, also, if it did, that's pretty bad because he banned me for pulling funding...?

You weren't accused of "making a joke about racism". He posted the part of the CoC [0] that he believed you to have violated. He then gave you a 24-hour-block because your remark "counts as doubling down" on what he originally accused you of.

I guess he didn't appreciate you implying that the CoC is a bunch of facile garbage.

[0] https://github.com/bundler/bundler/pull/5808#issuecomment-38...

God damn you people are sensitive. I see a guy (swrobel) venting about a bad API and using words like "infuriating", "REASONS", and several exclamation marks. he was confused about where he was skirting code of conduct because what he'd done was express disapproval of a design decision. he quotes the coc and then alludes to clauses that he believes would actually merit a warning - "slavery" and "indentured servitude" is language in the coc. note this isn't false dichotomy because the extreme end of the spectrum he's distinguished his comments from are explicitly forbidden by the coc. yes he used a smiley. God forbid. he also apologized and but somehow that's not being taken in into account by either you or indirect. then indirect responds with a positive prescription of the coc rather than a negative proscription (ie if it were a real contract it would be completely immaterial to the case since the rules cited don't forbid things only encourage). finally supposing we do take the rules cited by indirect as negative ("only this kind of language and behavior is allowed") there's not a shred of constructive feedback in indirect's initial response other than "don't do this" which just begs the question of whether he did anything to begin with. swrobel didn't show antipathy for anyone (he vented frustration about code). he didn't use exclusive language (he didn't say anything about any people at all), and he wasn't dismissive of any viewpoints because none were expressed by anyone.

so what really happened? indirect felt he was being criticized and used his small bit of power to silence the critic under the auspices of being just. lol.

thank you for stating this far more eloquently than I was able to

> he also apologized and but somehow that's not being taken in into account by either you or indirect.

Making a snide comment is not an apology. @swrobel jumped into a Github issue that was resolved and closed 6 months ago. And instead of taking a minute to read a discussion that agreed with his complaint, went off on a bizarre rant that would be flamed as outright asanine. At least @indirect followed his own CoC and downplayed it as being rude.

Again, what part of the CoC did I violate?

Also, I think it's both possible to apologize for my rant and point out that his CoC-waving was absurd.

Seems like you felt it more important to insult him/the CoC, given that's what you chose to first reply with. I don't know him but it sounds like he figured you were bullshitting.

you teach journalism classes and you don't see how your diction frames what happened in a way that either confirms your own biases or furthers your own agenda (proving swrobel was in the wrong). "snide comment", "bizarre rant", "asanine[sic]".

there's nothing bizarre or ranty or asinine about swrobel comments. it was venting at a poorly documented API - he admitted as much. is that the most professional thing to do? sure maybe not - but it's not cavalier banter about slavery either. and how about I flip it on you: how about a little empathy for him? if you want contribute to open source this is exactly the kind of empathy you need to have: will this choice make my API consumers miserable.

the apology is very clearly delineated from his comment on the coc.

"Sorry man, I was really annoyed because I was late to this party. I apologize for venting here."

it's very clear and unequivocal.

yes his citation of the coc included a sarcastic smiley. I've already said this: God forbid. reread his response without it. is it still snide? I suspect no.

finally getting back to indirect being unable to take the implicit criticism in stride: if you want to contribute to open source (really anything in public space) you have to be comfortable with criticism. swrobel didn't attack indirect personally (e.g. "you're such a dummy for this design choice") he criticized the choice. that's fine even if it was 6 months after it was fixed (because your mistakes will always be yours - they don't magically get stricken from the record after 6 months). if you are afraid that people will be upset with you for making mistakes then don't make things for people.

The asanine part comes from ranting about a bug in a Github issue in which the bug had been discussed, fixed, and closed.

Like I said: the same kind of empathy you expect from swrobel should be extended to him, hence it's not asinine (extremely stupid and foolish) but completely understandable even if still perturbing.

I do empathize with him, as I make plenty of asinine mistakes myself. But between him and the project admin, I empathize more with the latter, who asked him to be polite but got a snide insult as a response.

Here's another example of drama generated by André Arko:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15084792

Page is 404'ing.

Mirror:

http://archive.is/gOm3s

https://web.archive.org/web/20180420220028/https://samphippe...

Sounds like a good time for a fork of bundler.

$20,000 USD every month?

Why does it take so much to run RubyGems? I am guessing these cost are not just hardware cost?

Sidestepping the questionable wording (part of the OP's point is that RubyGems is _not_ funded by Ruby Together), bandwidth and human time are probably far more significant portions of operational cost than hardware.

But I thought fastly were already sponsoring Rubygems bandwidth.

I appears to be so—I was unaware of that when I posted my reply.

I'm genuinely curious if my perception that the Ruby community has more drama than other communities is actually true.

A community without drama is probably a low movement community.

It all boils down to the type of drama that is important.

Drama over technical choices is probably a good healthy conversation to have in a community.

Drama of someone potentially abusing power given to them by the community is bad.

I can't recall any other instances of this type of drama in the ruby community, but maybe someone else can remember?

Most of this drama is stirred up by just two people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com