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Comment by testdelacc1 | Hacker News Reader

I sympathise with the author, I really do. He’s obviously put in 15 years of work on this, and he’s engaging in a thoughtful, kind manner. The action on the trademark he’s taking is measured, and necessary.

But I don’t know if I agree with the title. It says bundler belongs to the ruby community. It should, certainly. But right now it belongs to the rich people who fund the work on Ruby and Rails. That’s DHH and Lutke (Shopify CEO).

Whether the community wrests control from them remains to be seen.

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No, the point is that it doesn't belong to them. They can’t just wrest control of a GitHub repo and claim they own it.

> But right now it belongs to the rich people who fund the work on Ruby and Rails. That’s DHH and Lutke (Shopify CEO).

Do you mean "right now" as in _now that they hijacked the Github repositories and locked out the previous owners_, or "right now" as in _for some time now, since they've been funding some Ruby work_?

The latter, they controlled it by funding maintainers. But the extent of their power and their lack of restraint in exercising that power only became clear now. DHH and Lutke don’t have the community’s best interests at heart.

Funding open source work doesn’t confer ownership, but also “they controlled it by funding maintainers” is not true —- many other companies and individuals from the community helped fund the work through Ruby Together and later Ruby Central.

I believe the events of the last few days speak for themselves. Shopify has exerted absolute control over important Ruby infra. Shopify’s CEO? Lutke. And Board member? DHH.

Yes, that is a recent development. And many of Ruby Central’s other sponsors and sustaining members are upset about it.

> Funding open source work doesn’t confer ownership

A true donation wouldn’t confer ownership, but in this case there are actual organizations and legal structures involved that did confer ownership.

Please explain - which organizations and legal structures, and how did they confer ownership? Be specific.

It's explained in the article with a direct link to the merger agreement

https://andre.arko.net/2025/09/25/bundler-belongs-to-the-rub...

You clearly haven't read the article or the merger agreement.

> DHH and Lutke don’t have the community’s best interests at heart.

How does this manifest?

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