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Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/

Read the above, but tl;dr is that Shopify executed a hostile takeover of Ruby Central for its own benefit, at the expense of long-term maintainers and the general community. I'm not sure if there's been any real change since then, but there are many reasons not to trust anything that the board says at this point.

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IMHO, Ruby Central keeps trying to find a way to frame all of this in a good light, but it seems like they keep falling flat. They tried doing filtered Q&A avoiding all the obvious questions that people hostile to what happened would ask, temporarily providing transparency reports that didn’t really say much. It all felt like very incompetent damage control.

I think they were hoping that handing it off to the Ruby core team would allow them to move on, but that requires ownership of their failings or at least actions that demonstrate that they will be better moving forward and none of that has happened.

Wait, I had no idea dhh was on the outs now. This is the first I've heard of this. I have to go look for more information about this. What did he do?

He came out as a white nationalist [1]. And he's always been contentious.

[1] https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...

MINASWAN...

WTFIDHHSAFA???

I would recommend as a starting point this beautiful piece from November: https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html

Not sure he's "on the outs", he on Shopify's board.

Sidekiq's solo dev (Mike Perham) has for many years made a generous donation to Ruby Central. He informed them that he didn't want his money to be spent platforming dhh at their conference, they ignored his request, he stopped his annual donations.

If you want to read about dhh's colorful blog posts and tweets: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...

Colorful is an odd way to spell "vocally bigoted".

I get downvoted here when I call him a racist.

Me too, and because of that I feel it's even more important to use language like racist, white nationalist, and fascist when describing him and his ilk, because that's what they are. Softening the language only leads to those beliefs becoming more normalized than they already are.

If you’d like to read, in his own words, his “coming out” as an ultra right wing racist piece of shit, feel free to look on his blog for the post titled “As I Remember London.”

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