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Comment by byroot | Hacker News Reader

They didn't. They initially left him as owner of the bundler gem after they removed 3 other owners, indicating they wanted for him to continue to be a maintainer.

He posted on the rubygems slack that he left and is conditioning his return on all other maintainers being reinstated.

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He said this on Slack earlier: "The immediate reason for this is simple: my commit access to the repository has been revoked, so I can no longer do the job anymore." Do you mean that he removed himself?

There are two different things, GitHub access, and gem ownership (permission to publish packages).

Based on previous posts, they did revoke everyone GitHub access, but with the intent to give it back to some maintainers after they signed some sort of contributor agreement.

However on the package publishing side, you can see that on Sept 20 3 people had access [0], hsbt, deivid and colby.

If you compare to aug 24, there was also andre, sebgiddins and rubymorillo (no idea who that is).

So that leads me to believe they had the intention to keep him, even more so because he was still contracting with them. AFAICT the intent was to remove accesses to former employees who left to start their own consultancy.

So to me, that post from RC checks out, and I think they were very well aware of who was contributing what.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250920140646/https://rubygems.... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250824033341/https://rubygems....

Edit: answering myself on who rubymorillo was, it's someone who didn't commit in that gem since 2018: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits?author=rubymori...

So yeah, permission management at Ruby Central did indeed seem to have been a huge mess. Not excusing the extremely poor rollout, but some cleanup was definitely overdue...

Have they ever explained why a contributor agreement is crucial? Will it assign copyright to RubyCentral?

Not to my knowledge. But I may have missed something.

My understanding is that having a legally enforceable contract help dissuade malevolent actions (easier to sue for breach of contract? But IANAL).

As for copyright attribution, I doubt it. That ship has sailed, that code base already contains contributions from hundreds of people, and I can’t really imagine a business model that would rely on relicensing.

> they did revoke everyone GitHub access, but with the intent to give it back to some maintainers after they signed some sort of contributor agreement.

That sounds like someone or some people spontaneously deciding they're going to become gatekeepers, without any kind of warning and/or Community discussion/agreement first.

> Not excusing the extremely poor rollout, but some cleanup was definitely overdue...

While true, what they should have done is discuss it with the maintainers _first_ and agree to a plan. Not just seize control, especially from active contributors. :(

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