after four months of private discussions, I have an update on the Bundler and RubyGems situation with Ruby Central: andre.arko.net/2026/03/03/fou…

Four months of Ruby Central mo...
Four months of Ruby Central moving Ruby backward

From the moment RubyGems was first created in 2004, Ruby Central provided governance without claiming ownership, to support the Ruby community. Providing governance meant creating processes to provide stability and predictability. Avoiding ownership meant allowing the community to contribute, to the point where unpaid volunteers created and controlled the entirety of RubyGems.org for many years. Last year, Ruby Central flipped that successful formula on its head. They now claim ownership of both Bundler and RubyGems, but refuse to provide governance. Ruby Central now claims sole control over all code and decisions, despite paying for only a few percent of the work required to create and sustain the projects across 22 years. Instead of providing stable and predictable processes, Ruby Central suddenly hijacked the Bundler and RubyGems codebases away from the existing maintainers, shut out the community, and started issuing the threats to sue.

André.Arko.net
@indirect.io so you’re gonna keep pretending this wasn’t about production server access (directly tied to github access) and that you didn’t send private legal threats (unrelated to access or trademarks) when you publically said “we want to move Ruby forward”
@indirect.io You keep cherry picking Marty’s words and keep not taking accountability for your side in how screwed things were. I HAVE talked to maintainers and I am working on a report. I would tell you that or look at your DMs but I’ve also been asked to not speak to you in private because of your legal threats.
@Schneems FYI, you’re replying to a Bluesky bridge account here. Its mentions wouldn’t be monitored. The canonical post from André is over on Bluesky.
@timriley @Schneems I do appreciate the extra context on this though because those are details I wasn't aware of!

@Schneems somewhat related the topic du jour, but the comments in that thread from jgaskins resonate strongly for me. To the best of my knowledge, there's been no apology for inviting DHH back to RailsConf - and that silence has destroyed my trust.

And I know you had no involvement in that, but perhaps it's something to feed back up the chain: if Ruby Central can't admit their sins and apologise for them, how are they going to win back the community's trust?

@pat I don’t think they do. It’s the board of thesus. The people who made that decision are not on the board anymore.

I literally got onboarded for the purpose of saying “I’m sorry” on behalf of Ruby central for this access incident. It’s why I encouraged you to submit an honest application if it’s what you thought they should do.

It’s all volunteers. The way to get them to do something is to volunteer. Not ask or demand they do it. Vote for change with your two feet.

@Schneems I don't think the fact that the board is different people absolves the organisation. And from an outsider's perspective - I've no idea who internally made these decisions, as far as I'm concerned, it was Ruby Central, and I'd expect Ruby Central collectively to own that.

And yes, I get that they're all volunteers - I've served on the Ruby Australia committee, I’ve run conferences, I know how it can be.

@Schneems @pat the current board continues to platform DHH, it was not a one and done incident of the past but a continued series of decisions
@Plentifulpanda @pat the board members just announced in January have NOT already platformed DHH. https://mailchi.mp/20fc57b4f4ee/the-ruby-central-readme-january2026-newsletter?ref=rubycentral.org
The Ruby Central README: January 2026 💎

@Schneems that could have been solved on a technical level
@soulcutter Maybe. But given "document how to offboard someone's access" wasn't a thing that existed....it's hard to over state how far away a technical solution was from being available to solve the problem at hand.