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Comment by directionless | Hacker News Reader

Given some of the ways Andre Arko gets described (See https://justin.searls.co/posts/why-im-not-rushing-to-take-si... for a recent overview) I'm a little wary of what the motivation behind this is.

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To take the maximally negative view of things:

    - uv is a cool tool, but Astral has signaled their intention to have it tie in nicely to paid services.
    - that's a nice moat!
    - Andre & friends saw that in the Python community (and uv's success) and decided they could do the same for Ruby
    - Their collective announces rv and now wants to make us dependent on them & friends for Ruby Gems.
    - After Hashicorp and others, I'm extremely wary of orgs luring me in with free shit.  Hashicorp is maybe the lightest example of this but they're very intentional about enterprise-walling business-essential features.
    - I don't want the Ruby ecosystem dependent on one party or even a tiny collective of people.  This is just as bad to me as the Ruby Central situation right now.

By "Astral" do you mean "Spinel"? Also, what paid services? So far the only paid services they've mentioned is retainer services that essentially amount to priority customer support. The tools themselves are only ever described as free

EDIT: Misread the comment and thought it was only about `rv`, not both `uv` and `rv`

"If it's free, you're the product"

What is Spinel? Astral is the developer of uv, and they have announced their hosted platform service, pyx [0]. It appears it will be FOSS as well, but they'll have a hosted version of it.

[0]: https://astral.sh/blog/introducing-pyx

spinel is the company spun up around rv, ruby's uv version.

https://spinel.coop/

My mistake, I completely misread your comment and thought you were _only_ talking about `rv` as opposed to both `uv` and `rv`!

The Ruby ecosystem is already decentralised in that there is no single source of truth for published gems. You can pull the source from any software forge that uses git, you can point to any self hosted gem server or use something like Artifactory or GitHub package registry. You can vendor the code if you want.

This entire post is practically the case in point, except I’m not clear on how they got real time sync with RubyGems and if any other competitor would have the same capability.

To use Astral and uv as an example, they would have to fork PyPI and maintain all the infra for that and not just the tool that manages the dependencies.

This reads like a hit piece based on a personal vendetta. I'd be careful how much weight to give this.

> When Ruby Together first launched in 2015, the website suggested donations went to pay "our team" (...) This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.

This a fact. By this alone I don't think Andre Arko is an honest person.

Back in the day, nobody ever had said to me that they believed I was earning money from Ruby Together. This whole thing was speculation at best. And regardless, once it was suggested that this may be a possibility, it was immediately changed to be unambiguous.

André is absolutely a standup individual.

I have tried to stay in good terms with the other people involved in this (except DHH), but this claim was always ridiculous.

I was misremembering it. Now that I've checked, it's clear that the claim was that the money was for paying "the team" [1], which consisted of André Arko and David Radcliffe [2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150919025358/https://rubytoget...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150919025603/https://rubytoget...

It's all good, you were quoting the blog post.

Frankly that page is even more clear than I remembered. All of this happened so long ago.

I just want to know how much was David Radcliffe getting paid for his time?

Your links are off-base. They're from September 2015, which is months after Andre Arko was told to revise the /teams page.

Since no /teams page was archived before March 2015, here's the Github commit of the overly vague team page https://github.com/rubytogether/rubytogether.org/blob/9a03c4.... This page was linked from https://web.archive.org/web/20150425040538/http://RubyTogeth... which stated "We pool funds from corporate and individual members to pay our team[github link]"

Altogether, it demonstrates how Andre misled his audience on who was getting the money. IMO, I see a distinct pattern of him crossing boundaries and then covering it up using his social skills & friend group.

This absolutely happened and is not speculation. I can't find the emails from the individuals that emailed me, but I did find my email to the board of directors asking that the website language be changed because people had pinged me thinking I would be getting money, or that the money would go to fund rubygems.org.

At the time I'd sent the email I was unaware Ruby Together was on HN front page (and that's why people were pinging me)

Okay, if you got emails, you got emails, but I did not.

I absolutely wouldn't want people to think that I'd be getting the money, so I think clarifying it was a good thing, regardless.

It's so weird of you to jump in like this, man.

Can you explain what you find so weird? From what I can tell, the GP is adding useful information using his firsthand experience.

Did they? No evidence and worded to suggest Steve didn’t experience it, that counts as useful information now?

I think you may have misread it. The original claim is:

> This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.

Steve said "that didn't happen to me" and then Aaron said "that definitely did happen to me". Seems pretty relevant. I don't think he was claiming steve was wrong in not having heard that, but Aaron was saying it did happen to him, so the claim is true.

(and in terms of evidence, do you want him to share the emails he got? A first hand account seems enough evidence to me)

Seems pretty unambiguous, and a good reason to chime in.

It's weird for people to try and set the record straight when you mention them by name?

He didn't set any record straight. Why are you people imagining content?

TBH the whole thing is pretty opaque. There are a lot of accusations floating around. It's pretty easily to capitalize on "Big evil shopify is making a takeover", but I suspect there's a lot more happening behind the scenes.

Does it? Seems pretty detailed with plenty of easily verifiable details...

To follow up here, it sure sounds like Andre is not entirely acting in good faith.

https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-ev... discusses that a precipitating event was Andre asking for a copy of the http access logs to monetize them.

I think this is confirmed by Mike Perham's comment in https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1o2bxol/comment/ninn6...

> In this case I have first hand knowledge since he pitched me on the idea: would Sidekiq, being a big sponsor of Ruby Central in the past, be interested if rubygems could somehow use the remote IP to identify the companies downloading the sidekiq gem so I could use that to upsell those companies

^^^ THIS ^^^! This is not being highlighted enough.

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