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Comment by jrhey | Hacker News Reader

There's no real substance behind the fork other than "I don't like DHH".

The author says "Rails is done" meaning, feature complete. So he wants to fork it and have you use that fork instead. Why? I don't know. If it's truly "done", why does it matter what the repository name is? The underlying code will still be the same.

> "I hope we can all thrive together"

Except DHH et al?

> "we want to continue building our web applications without feeling icky."

I didn't know you could feel so negative about the code YOU write, while happily adopting code written by the person you vehemently disagree with.

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Shouldn’t that be enough? Lots of people worked together to build Rails before DHH revealed his extreme political views. It’s only natural that many of them want to go back to the way things were when they could just focus on Rails and not have to think about their contributions supporting someone hateful.

If you haven’t, read this post by someone who has been in the community for a while and targeted by DHH’s rhetoric about how Britain should only be for white people – they can’t thrive together as long he’s opposed to that!

> As a non-white British citizen born and raised in London, I can’t explain just how painful it is to hear this sort of toxic rhetoric being promoted by one of the most prominent and visible leaders of the Ruby community. I experienced my fair share of racism growing up in London in the eighties and nineties from the very people that DHH is lionising in his post. White men who questioned my right to exist. Places and spaces where I didn’t feel welcome or safe because of my ethnic origin. And despite the recent rise in far-right politics, for the most part things are much better today. Anyone who has spent even the smallest amount of time in the great city of London knows that it is precisely its rich multiculturalism that makes it great. The migration issue in Britain is complicated and multi-layered and DHH wades into it with all the subtlety and nuance of a bull in china shop, sharing the same old and tired xenophobic tropes.

https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...

As a non-white Irish citizen going to school here in the 90's, I hear you. I've been through that.

But, I don't understand why people think a fork of his work magically scrubs his essence from it.

And are they also doubling-down on ensuring his future ideas and commit hashes never find their way into Amiko?

What's the long-term play here because I don't see it other than forking for the sake of changing ownership which does nothing to achieve what the author wants to achieve. A genuine fork which meets his criteria of abolishing DHH would be to completely change the direction and future roadmap while avoiding any future cross-DHH-contamination entirely.

I think they’re hoping that the people in the community they like will follow. I agree that it that the odds seem daunting - the best example which comes to mind is MariaDB and that took a company as hated as Oracle, but who knows. It also seems like the overall health of the Ruby community will be a factor: it’s easy to imagine people leaving Rails picking more different things like the increasing percentage of people who never used it. A whiff of controversy can be deadly for open source adoption at businesses.

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