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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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