So, after the seeming hostile takeover of RubyGems, I this week saw this announcement:
Of a reboot of RubyGems by its own former maintainers, governance structure to be announced tomorrow. Can people who are plugged into the Ruby community give me a sense of how significant an event this is? Does it have a chance to displace RubyCentral?
RubyCentral do seem to have, in their coup, successfully claimed the "instutitions" of Ruby in the sense of domain names and github repos. But the community, and (a lot?) (most of?) the authors of the source in those github repos do not seem to be on board:
https://andre.arko.net/2025/09/25/bundler-belongs-to-the-ruby-community/
So this seems like a really key test case, whether open source is made of living communities or just an opaque content pipeline for corporate actors to plug their build systems into
I’ve spent 15 years of my life working on Bundler. When I introduce myself, people say “oh, the Bundler guy?”, and I am forced to agree. I didn’t come up with the original idea for Bundler (that was Yehuda). I also didn’t work on the first six months worth of prototypes. That was all Carl and Yehuda together, back when “Carlhuda” was a super-prolific author of Ruby libraries, including most of the work to modularize Rails for version 3.
mcc
Howard Chu @ Symas