the former maintainers of Bundler and RubyGems have a proposal: we want to move Ruby forward https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/26/we-want-to-move-ruby-forward/
We want to move Ruby forward

On September 9, without warning, Ruby Central kicked out the maintainers who have cared for Bundler and RubyGems for over a decade. Ruby Central made these changes against the established project policies, while ignoring all objections from the maintainers’ team. At the time, Ruby Central claimed these changes were “temporary". However, None of the “temporary” changes made by Ruby Central have been undone, more than six weeks later. Ruby Central still has not communicated with the removed maintainers about restoring any permissions. Ruby Central still has not offered “operator agreements” or “contributor agreements” to any of the removed maintainers. The Ruby Together merger agreement plainly states that it is the maintainers who will decide what is best for their projects, not Ruby Central. Last week, Matz stepped in to assume control of RubyGems and Bundler himself. His announcement states that the Ruby core team will assume control and responsibility for the primary RubyGems and Bundler GitHub repository. Ruby Central did not communicate with any removed maintainers before transferring control of the rubygems/rubygems GitHub repo to the Ruby core team. On October 24th, Shan publicly confirmed she does not believe the maintainers need to be told why they were removed. While we know that Ruby Central had no right to act the way they did, it is nevertheless clear to us that the Ruby community will be better off if the codebase, maintenance, and legal rights to RubyGems and Bundler are all together in the same place.

André.Arko.net
@indirect this doesn't move Ruby forward. This simply legitimizes the bad actors in a way that makes the overall community less safe. Your responsibility is to fork not hand over control of everything and hope for the best. If you don't want that burden that's okay but do not further legitimize things simply to reduce conflict with a literal white supremacist

@Lunaphied @indirect Sounds basically like "they did a coup, let them have it; we've got better things to do." -- which leaves Ruby in the hands of (basically) fascists, but also deprives said fash of any conflict they were hoping to start.

Question is: what does the larger user-community do about Ruby? Time for a fork?

@woozle @Lunaphied @indirect I do worry that this sort of strategic retreat (if that is a fair way to characterize it) just emboldens the worst people in the Ruby community. But I'm also not sure that "we have better things to do" is necessarily to be regretted as a response.

@soaproot @Lunaphied @indirect

I would have liked to see something more strongly-worded from them; it sounds a bit too much like capitulation... but I could be reading it wrong.

@indirect what happened to the gem coop? why completely give up?
@esoterra it didn't go anywhere! the post mentions at the end that the reason for this proposal is so we can focusing our time and energy on gem coop and projects like it
@indirect why give up the Bundler IP though? that feels like something the coop should keep