Gem.coop

by mbStavola • 10 months ago

525 272 10 months ago

bloudermilk• 10 months ago

It’s amazing to see the open source community step up like this. Kudos and gratitude to everyone that made this happen!

lemper• 10 months ago

yeah, but still, the maintainers need to be paid for their time and expertise. not to mention, although bandwidth and storage is cheap, somebody still have to foot the bill. i suggest people donate to this project.

splittydev• 10 months ago

Is there any context on why? Is there some controversy regarding RubyGems.org I'm not aware of?

KingOfCoders2• 10 months ago

As I understood it, to secure (their words) the supply chain, they took ownership of the code and repo (which others disputed as being owned by them) and kicked out users from Github.

It is said the underlying cause is that devs push rv which is threatening RubyGems.

mosselman• 10 months ago

How is rv threatening rubygems? I am pretty excited about rv on first glance, I tried it and it was too beta when I did to work nicely, but definitely good to have a uv type tool for ruby.

wallmountedtv• 10 months ago

In short, a hostile takeover forced by Shopify through Ruby Central.

It was sparked after Ruby Central chose to platform an extremist figure prominently for their last RailsConf against the wishes of the sponsors, losing them a lot of sponsorship money, as well as community support.

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

mnx• 10 months ago

Might be worth noting the figure in question is the creator of Ruby on Rails.

JimDabell• 10 months ago

It was sparked after Ruby Central chose to platform an extremist figure prominently for their last RailsConf

This is so incredibly one-sided that it misleads more than it informs.

The person they are talking about is DHH. Inviting the creator of Rails to speak at RailsConf – a conference for Rails – is not the outlandish behaviour this comment makes it sound like.

byroot5• 10 months ago

a hostile takeover forced by Shopify through Ruby Central.

That's entirely unsubstantiated.

pil0u3• 10 months ago

This article was the most nuanced I found while everything was still hot. https://archive.ph/SEzoV

phoronixrly12• 10 months ago

I hope they tackle the actual main issue with Rubygems -- lack of any sort of code signing... (I know the functionality exists, but it's not required to publish in Rubygems, and off by default on gem install. In other words it's as if it doesn't exist)

The fash problem in the Rails ecosystem is next on the list, and I hope there is community consensus to fork this as well.

burnt-resistor• 10 months ago

It has code signing. It's just optional, inconvenient, and so unused because of Tragedy of the Commons and complacency. https://guides.rubygems.org/security/

https://www.benjaminfleischer.com/2013/11/08/how-to-sign-you...

phoronixrly12• 10 months ago

As I said, it's as good as no code signing. The very lack of a chain of trust stemming from rubygems that can be used to verify gem authenticity makes the whole thing useless.

simianparrot5• 10 months ago

What does “fash problem” mean?

phoronixrly12• 10 months ago

If you know you know.

ramon156• 10 months ago

There's some weird opinions coming from mostly DHH. My personal take is that they're blatantly racist, but everyone can have their own

Here's some fun facts:

- DHH enforced a "No Politics at Work" policy.

- DHH wrote a post expressing that he wouldn't want to live in London anymore because it's "no longer full of native Brits", and expressed support for a Tommy Robinson march he called "heartwarming". Tommy Robinson is described as "an anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK's most prominent far-right activists.". The march DHH praised featured speakers calling for ethnic cleansing via "remigration" and banning all non-Christian religions.

- DHH also promoted "demographic replacement" conspiracy theories and used language connecting immigration to crime, particularly regarding "Pakistani rape gangs" and street theft.

- DHH has been publicly critical of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. This one isn't backed by facts, so take it with a grain of salt.

marknutter4• 10 months ago

That's the part where the term "fascist" is misused to smear somebody they disagree with. It can be safely ignored.

steve_gh2• 10 months ago

I'm really pleased to see this happening, but sad that it has come to this.

What I'd really like to see is a whole bunch of people acting more professionally. Who you pray to, who you vote for, and who you sleep with are irrelevant to a professional context - and open source development is a professional context. So everyone needs to keep their professional and personal lives separate. I know that at best I would be disciplined, and at worst sacked if I made comments on the lines that some of the lead players in this sorry saga have made. And that's not pointing the finger at any one person.

hiimkeks3• 10 months ago

If who you vote for will put me into a torture camp (or otherwise devalues my life or personhood), then I can't work with you, so no it is not irrelevant.

(neither the "me" nor the "you" here refer to you or me personally ofc.)

pil0u3• 10 months ago

Agreed. Your example could sound like exaggerated, but silence is a form of opinion, of vote, of approval. Even in a professional context, because work is part of the society we live in.

This whole "DHH situation" with Rails has put my mind in weird position. I admire the Rails creator, the business man, the speaker. I admire what he builds, how passionate he is about his work and open-source software. But I very strongly disagree with his vision of immigration, nationalism, parenting, well most of his vision of society.

I was made aware about these opinions because people talked about it. Thanks to these people, I read and listen to him with more nuance, more critical thinking. That does not necessarily mean I would discard Rails, cancel the dude or write shit about him, but that surely means that I will be more careful about how the opinions of this 1 person could impact mine, the ecosystem I work with and the larger ecosystem I live in that is society.

fourseventy• 10 months ago

Please stop with this type of ridiculous hyperbole.

ishouldbework3• 10 months ago

"will put me into a torture camp" for sure, but "devalues my life or personhood" is pretty vague. So, for example, if I value guns and consider them necessary for my well being and personal safety, should I refuse to work with anyone who votes for increased gun control? This sounds like a recipe for very fragmented, unstable society.

shadowgovt11• 10 months ago

I think the salient meta-concept here is "Open source development is an inherently collaborative enterprise, and if people cannot collaborate, it stifles creation of open source projects and software."

There may very well simply be political eras where the floor of trust isn't there for open source to spring forward by leaps and bounds.

wahnfrieden2• 10 months ago

Not everyone involved in open source has a boss. I don't care what a boss would hypothetically do to me, so that's not helpful guidance.

nathanaldensr• 10 months ago

Completely agreed. Sorry, other folks, but you have no right to gatekeep my speech in any way in a professional context. Are you a family member? Then sure, we can have a discussion. Am I a member of your private club or otherwise dependent on your approval of my thoughts or beliefs? Then let's talk. Otherwise, leave me alone. You (the collective you) don't get to decide what I am and am not allowed to think and believe.

giraffe_lady2• 10 months ago

Nobody is constraining your beliefs or expressions of them. People are exercising their own individual right not to associate with people who express certain beliefs.

tensor• 10 months ago

I've been in the "keep work and politics" separate camp most of my life. However, with the lines that have been crossed recently, where literal democracy and freedom are at stake, I don't think people have the luxury of keeping work and politics separate any longer. Fascism is bad and people cannot be silent.

halicarnassus• 10 months ago

Great move to counter the hostile takeover of the RubyGems GitHub repo (not the rubygems.org repo) and organization by Ruby Central.

I hope they find financing to cover hosting costs.

joeldrapper8• 10 months ago

I believe the hosting is already covered.

mijoharas12• 10 months ago

Is there anything more you can share about that? I guess I should just sign up to the newsletter and wait and find out...

SSLy• 10 months ago

flagged??

milliams• 10 months ago

Based on the comments getting downvoted, it feels like some brigading going on.

joeldrapper8• 10 months ago

Why has this been flagged?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF3• 10 months ago

Just some background: there is a controversy in the Ruby community[0][2] around the governance of the rubygems project. It has been maintained for a long time by employees of Ruby Central but not in a corporate capacity. There was a recent hostile takeover of this project by the Ruby Central corporate arm.

The most likely reason it was flagged from my perspective is that David Heinemeier Hansson (who created rails) is kind of the figurehead of this community and he has controversial opinions[1] which people believe make him unfit to represent their community. The controversy has manifested as people speaking out against DHH in his position. So this post seems to have been flagged for being "political" because it is seemingly in opposition to rubygems for the DHH reason.

0: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

1: https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance (this article has a lot of examples from DHH's blog)

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348390

ilikepi2• 10 months ago

Er...FYI, your [2] link is to a discussion about an article written by the person to whom you are responding.

Personally, I think the reason this post about gem.coop has been flagged is that we've reached the point at which new HN threads about things related to the recent RubyGems shake-up quickly devolve into people rehashing the DHH "aspect" of it all. So it has become less about flagging the actual target of the post and more about flagging the parts of the discussion that seem to go nowhere.

EDIT: expanded

belahon• 10 months ago

1: https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance (this article has a lot of examples from DHH's blog)

Basically just a blog post from some guy aghast that DHH has different political opinions to him. I'm politically on the left too but I can't imagine getting so incensed about someone else having right-leaning views.

Do these people never leave the house to meet anyone outside their echo chamber? The mind boggles.

veeti3• 10 months ago

Remove flags 2025, all the best stuff is in https://news.ycombinator.com/active. I don't even use Ruby right now, have no dog in whatever drama is behind this, but I don't see what's so offensive about knowing Gem.coop is now a thing.

sleight42• 10 months ago

Why is this flagged? This is super relevant to HN!

wahnfrieden2• 10 months ago

Brigading

captn3m0• 10 months ago

+1.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF3• 10 months ago

I wrote this comment with what I understand to be the relevant context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490531

directionless3• 10 months ago

Given some of the ways Andre Arko gets described (See https://justin.searls.co/posts/why-im-not-rushing-to-take-si... for a recent overview) I'm a little wary of what the motivation behind this is.

kimos• 10 months ago

This reads like a hit piece based on a personal vendetta. I'd be careful how much weight to give this.

nomdep3• 10 months ago

When Ruby Together first launched in 2015, the website suggested donations went to pay "our team" (...) This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.

This a fact. By this alone I don't think Andre Arko is an honest person.

directionless3• 10 months ago

TBH the whole thing is pretty opaque. There are a lot of accusations floating around. It's pretty easily to capitalize on "Big evil shopify is making a takeover", but I suspect there's a lot more happening behind the scenes.

dismalaf6• 10 months ago

Does it? Seems pretty detailed with plenty of easily verifiable details...

busterarm3• 10 months ago

To take the maximally negative view of things:

    - uv is a cool tool, but Astral has signaled their intention to have it tie in nicely to paid services.
    - that's a nice moat!
    - Andre & friends saw that in the Python community (and uv's success) and decided they could do the same for Ruby
    - Their collective announces rv and now wants to make us dependent on them & friends for Ruby Gems.
    - After Hashicorp and others, I'm extremely wary of orgs luring me in with free shit.  Hashicorp is maybe the lightest example of this but they're very intentional about enterprise-walling business-essential features.
    - I don't want the Ruby ecosystem dependent on one party or even a tiny collective of people.  This is just as bad to me as the Ruby Central situation right now.

davidcelis3• 10 months ago

By "Astral" do you mean "Spinel"? Also, what paid services? So far the only paid services they've mentioned is retainer services that essentially amount to priority customer support. The tools themselves are only ever described as free

EDIT: Misread the comment and thought it was only about `rv`, not both `uv` and `rv`

ljm2• 10 months ago

The Ruby ecosystem is already decentralised in that there is no single source of truth for published gems. You can pull the source from any software forge that uses git, you can point to any self hosted gem server or use something like Artifactory or GitHub package registry. You can vendor the code if you want.

This entire post is practically the case in point, except I’m not clear on how they got real time sync with RubyGems and if any other competitor would have the same capability.

To use Astral and uv as an example, they would have to fork PyPI and maintain all the infra for that and not just the tool that manages the dependencies.

directionless3• 10 months ago

To follow up here, it sure sounds like Andre is not entirely acting in good faith.

https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-ev... discusses that a precipitating event was Andre asking for a copy of the http access logs to monetize them.

I think this is confirmed by Mike Perham's comment in https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1o2bxol/comment/ninn6...

In this case I have first hand knowledge since he pitched me on the idea: would Sidekiq, being a big sponsor of Ruby Central in the past, be interested if rubygems could somehow use the remote IP to identify the companies downloading the sidekiq gem so I could use that to upsell those companies

daniel_black• 9 months ago

^^^ THIS ^^^! This is not being highlighted enough.

mijoharas12• 10 months ago

So, ignoring everything that got us here, what do people think about this?

As I see it, there is the original rubygems, which has lost all of it's maintainers, and this new one, that has most of the original active maintainers? (how many were there before? it has most of the ones I think about, but I didn't know who was active over there. I mostly saw activity from deivid and didn't know about most of the others to be honest).

It kind feels like this fork is the better maintained piece of software now.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Are any people thinking of moving over soon?

Is there any information on what the funding model will be? Also @joeldrapper/anyone is there anything you can share about how the hosting is being covered?[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490386

mijoharas12• 10 months ago

re: funding model, looks like it's TBD[0]

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/indirect.io/post/3m2j2pcinz22j

phoronixrly12• 10 months ago

I don't plan on switching to a rubygems fork that does not offer technical/security benefits over the original.

They can win me over with a gem distribution site that requires code signing out of the box and a bundler that enforces it out of the box.

mijoharas12• 10 months ago

For me, having the software be maintained (and have a security engineer working on it) feels like a security benefit.

Does the original have many maintainers left?

joeldrapper8• 10 months ago

I expect a lot of people will stop pushing gem updates to `rubygems.org` once `gem.coop` supports publishing directly to namespaces.

soraminazuki11• 10 months ago

Which part of a project that kicked out its original maintainers still feels "original" to you? At this point, rubygems.org is the fork.

Oh, how times have changed. If Oracle were to close source OpenSolaris today, many here would likely rally behind it, especially if Larry Ellison appeared to align with the right. Submissions about Illumos would have been heavily flagged, much like this one has been for a while.

sussmannbaka2• 10 months ago

They had a minor security incident right off the bat, demonstrating they don’t even fully understand what they stole. They aren’t equipped to do the job.

baggy_trough3• 10 months ago

I personally cannot think of a new ruby gems or bundler feature from the past decade that I noticed or cared about. That isn't to say that there aren't any; I just don't know what they are.

frenkel• 10 months ago

Lockfile checksums are quite new and useful.

mijoharas12• 10 months ago

I think I basically agree with this, but my thoughts are more on which org is better placed now to respond to things like the recent supply chain attacks (ref for the specific recent ruby one[0][1]).

I'm unsure on who is better placed to handle that stuff now. My view is that the people that were doing that are now with gem.coop, but rubygems still has the infra (i.e. you'd email security@rubygems.org still for now).

I'm unsure about what to think about longer term (my personal approach is currently "wait and see").

Similarly, I'm perfectly happy with bundler for now, but if `rv` turns out to be like `uv`, I'd happily switch (drop-in replacement, but faster/some better features).

[0] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/60-malicious-...

[1] https://blog.rubygems.org/2025/08/08/malicious-gems-removal....

ilikepi2• 10 months ago

There have been several releases with incremental but still notable performance improvements. The overall cadence has been pretty steady, intentionally targeting roughly one minor release per year since 2019-ish, with handfuls of quality of life improvements in each. Arguably RubyGems and Bundler are infrastructure, so the major feature is stability. What sort of big feature are you imagining is missing from your dependency management system?

ilvez• 10 months ago

They made bundler output compact, previously it spammed all installed versions and updates mixed, now you can see just updates if you do those for example.. or quite concise "all OK" if everything is as it should be. Small but really nice quality of life change imo

shadowgovt11• 10 months ago

I think right off the bat since they chose .coop as their TLD, a lot of corporate firewalls auto-block them and they have immediately decided to fight an uphill battle to get allow-listed to be a gem repo.

This does not bode well for the team having the socio-technical savviness to see this project through.

w0m• 10 months ago

seems like an easy fix in a month with a new TLD though.

spit2wind• 10 months ago

Really? Maybe I'm naive, but why would .coop be blocked?

hombre_fatal• 10 months ago

How will anything ever change we're still guilted into thinking about crappy default corporate firewalls when choosing a TLD?

Though there's no way that this is something you care about, cmon.

chillfox2• 10 months ago

Don't think it will be the TLD specifically. Most corporate firewalls block domains under a certain age, so it will just be a matter of time.

nomdep3• 10 months ago

It kind of feels like this fork is the better-maintained piece of software now.

Maybe, but I feel the value of the index is the storage and bandwidth and not the software itself, isn't it?

Could an index work by just being a search engine for gems, storing the hashes, but pointing to external resources, like GitHub repos, for the download itself?

soraminazuki11• 10 months ago

Trustworthiness is far more important for a package manager. No amount of storage or bandwidth can compensate for an untrustworthy package manager.

mijoharas12• 10 months ago

Isn't that how golang works?

I remember some complaints about the traffic that it produced[0] (though I don't think it's a bad idea. Basically federated downloads).

[0] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2023-01-09-gomodulemirror/

x3n0ph3n36• 10 months ago

I'm starkly opposed to this ridiculous fragmenting of the community. They can and should all go work out contribution agreements with RubyCentral and get over their egos.

davidcelis3• 10 months ago

What makes you think they _haven't_ tried to work things out with Ruby Central? As per a separate article[1], this seems to be a last resort:

“Since Ruby Central has informed us they will never allow us to continue working on the projects they now claim they own, that we successfully maintained and operated for the last ten years, the former RubyGems team is launching gem.coop today.”

[1] https://socket.dev/blog/gem-cooperative-emerges-as-a-communi...

ljm2• 10 months ago

The main page itself provides little to no info so I’m going to make a few assumptions that, to me, seem logical:

1. It must depend on RubyGems in order to stay in sync, because people publish to RubyGems.

2. It has no UI to search or view gems, so still depends on RubyGems for that.

Ignoring any question about technical detail or implementation: there is zero practical reason or motivation to switch unless I am ideologically aligned with the maintainers and their reasoning.

As such, there is zero reason to even entertain the idea of switching in a professional context. At best I’d have to care enough to remember it for personal projects.

So it is with almost any fork. It’ll either converge with the mainline after achieving its goals, take over as the new status quo, or fade into obscurity. If I don’t have any direct stake in that then I’m going to wait it out.

This isn’t to discredit or discount the work or the reasoning, of course. It arguably has a far better standing than forking Rails because of DHH.

daitangio• 10 months ago

True, but this is a new beginning.Give time and credit to build an alternative. I think another repo server will not harm anyone in the long run

bradgessler• 10 months ago

It's bittersweet.

The suckiest thing is if the fork pans out, it will look a lot like JS: "Which package manager do you want to use?". That beautiful simplicity of "just use bundler and ruby gems" will be gone.

One thing I will give them massive credit for is walking-the-walk. There wasn't really that much complaining for the aggrieved maintainers of RubyGems. They made a public statement describing their grievances, then quietly got to work on a fork. Taking on a fork of RubyGems seems impossible and foolish, but they now have a non-zero chance of succeeding because they're doing it.

Most people I've talked to inside of big orgs are going to stick with the "safe boring" thing, which will probably be RC backed by Shopify. They will probably throw security bureaucracy at the problem, which will make SOC 2, ISO 270001 auditors. I don't think we'll see a lot of innovation coming from RC since the executive director is non-technical and has demonstrated a very ham-fisted approach to running the organization that seems to be out of touch with developers.

On the flip side, I think if gems.coop takes off, it will be because it's a "better mousetrap". One of the people behind it, André, is working on https://rv.dev, which promises to be a faster, "all-in-one", tool for managing ruby versions, gem dependencies, and even has an "npx-like" run this from from the CLI, the right version of Ruby will install, the gems will install, and it will run. That's a much better DX that I could see developers going for.

I've seen discussions on the periphery of adding namespaces to gems, bringing in checksums, and overall taking a more aggressive technical approach to security. I could see that "winning" over a long enough timeframe if RC continues on their current course.

From a fund-raising PoV, I'm starting to put together the clues that André believes organizations with the means to pay for OSS infrastructure should pay for it. I think I agree with this point-of-view and think it's a path for funding that's more transparent than "A group of donors". I hope we start to see infrastructure run in a manner where the costs are accurately estimated, then divided by the number of companies with the means to pay to arrive at the price.

There's absolutely on consensus on my final point, but I think the root cause of RC's catastrophic failure is having too much of a concentration of funding from a few donors. If you're new to this drama, a major donor pulled funding from RC because they didn't ideologically agree with a conference guest. The details are out there if you want to dive into it, but to keep this thread on point, I hope Ruby Co-op figures out how to spread out their funding model across 100's or 1000's so this doesn't happen again.

dismalaf6• 10 months ago

So, ignoring everything that got us here, what do people think about this?

It's fine. Keeps all the complainers away from the larger ecosystem.

I personally trust Ruby Central, 37signals, Shopify, DHH, Tobi, Matz and others over the guy who was launching a startup to compete with rubygems while being a maintainer for rubygems.

baobun2• 10 months ago

It kind feels like this fork is the better maintained piece of software now.

Which fork of what software..?

We’re excited to introduce gem.coop – a new server for gems in the Ruby ecosystem.

This is a new hosting service for gems, not a fork of bundler. Or is there missing context?

joeldrapper8• 10 months ago

I believe the CDN is provided for free by Fastly. Not sure about other funding at the moment.

realty_geek• 10 months ago

Flagging this post is quite disturbing.

There is a conversation around this which needs to be had. Maybe on bsky or x?

https://x.com/africajam/status/1975206106738901110

https://bsky.app/profile/indirect.io/post/3m2iq5p7eoc2j

sandstrom• 10 months ago

I understand forking is sometimes needed, but it's also somewhat discouraging to see that the differences couldn't be reconciled.

As long as people are aligned on advancing the Ruby ecosystem, I think it should be possible to cooperate even if there are disagreement in other areas [which political party you support, differences in personal opinions, etc].

Maybe it'll be resolved eventually, just like Merb <> Rails, Bundler <> RubyGems and RubyTogether <> RubyCentral were eventually merged. That's what I'm hoping for!

thomascountz• 10 months ago

If we isolate this from the recent controversy: in general, is an alternative (yet mostly compatible) package source, package manager, and/or language version manager neutral, good, or bad for an open source ecosystem?

MrDarcy• 10 months ago

Mostly good. Monopolies stagnate. Competition helps drive innovation.

In open source too.

soraminazuki11• 10 months ago

So RubyGems has betrayed its community by ousting its maintainers. When a community-focused alternative created by the original maintainers is announced, it gets flagged on HN. What is wrong with people?

This situation is eerily similar to the Freenode takeover[1] and the subsequent formation of Libera Chat[2] a few years ago, even down to the political leanings of those behind the takeover. Except if the Freenode incident occurred today, there would be a vocal portion on HN vehemently siding with Freenode solely based on the perceived political affiliations of its owners. Submissions about Libera Chat would face heavy flagging, much like this one has.

It seems the Freenode team may have advanced their plans just a bit too early.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286628

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27207734

sosodev• 10 months ago

Flagging is definitely getting abused more on HN lately. The consensus seems to be that politics and/or morals are irrelevant outside of personal affairs so we must not have these conversations here.

soraminazuki11• 10 months ago

Which is absurd because the hostile takeover of RubyGems primarily involves technology, with serious implications for the security and trust of nearly all Ruby code. Those flagging this submission are the ones prioritizing politics over this critical issue.

shevy-java4• 10 months ago

I could be wrong but it may be that some have an additional agenda to try to make e. g. competition to Ruby Central fail. You can see this on ruby-reddit, e. g. by u/f9ae8221b - either way I think the by far best strategy for gem.coop is to address all concerns and statements made, including the wrong ones. Simply be better than rubygems.org - everywhere. (Also, u/f9ae8221b is super-impatient; why can't he wait for a while? Rome was not built in a day, it is strange how he thinks to know the future. I don't know the future - let's wait and see. In the worst case gem.coop will fail; in the best case it'll fix numerous issues, including, by the way, gem/bundler not having had the same functionality. And namespacing too; and inactive accounts, and so on, and so forth. There is a ton of things to do.)

vidugavia• 10 months ago

He is employee of Shopify, which is a side in all this. I would take these conspiracy theories with a grain of salt at least.

insane_dreamer• 10 months ago

Important move to maintain a free community. I'm switching over to Gem.coop now.

salzig3• 10 months ago

Just a thought of mine: why don’t we switch fully to git? Commit signing, tag signing, Decentralize. Doesn’t that sound like a good alternativ?

zdragnar• 10 months ago

Someone has to run the git server. Then, someone has to find the git server to pull each gem from, since not every git server is likely to be up-to-date with the each gem, or the correct version. Since these are all decentralized, each individual owner of a git server has to independently scale as more people start using each one.

The benefit to being centralized is... everything is in one place. Everything scales at once. Every update is available at the same time.

We did this back in the day using artifactory and co. to proxy NPM and a few other package managers as well as docker containers and some other things. No third party service going down could keep us from deploying.

Not everyone does it because as a solo developer or a small team, as it feels like pointless overhead.

salzig3• 10 months ago

So GitHub would be one option. Developers already discover all kind of things there. And each gem can still be provided by its “main repository”, but I don’t mind on whatever domain that repository is located. Somewhat how container images are referenced/distributed already. I think go already does it like that too.

having a decentralized, and maybe sometime unavailable, infrastructure would make more people think about the problem and maybe brings us more stable solutions than we have now.

pornel• 10 months ago

The git protocol is more complex and harder to scale. It's especially wasteful if people are going to redownload all packages every time their amnesiac CI runs.

Single-file archives are much easier to distribute.

Digests and signatures have standard algorithms, not unique to git. Key/identity management is the hard part, but git doesn't solve it for you (if you don't confuse git with GitHub).

webstrand• 10 months ago

git bundles exist to solve the single-file caching and distribution problems

salzig3• 10 months ago

Going crazy: we cold also adopt the container registry api for distributing gems, similar to how helm charts are also distributed nower days.

phoronixrly12• 10 months ago

You've seen golang's package... situation?... and you still think switching to Git is a good idea?

lr02• 10 months ago

What "situation"?

lr02• 10 months ago

Exactly. Go already adopts that.

dismalaf6• 10 months ago

Well, rubygems (the software) can pull from any git repository. So we kind of have it already anyway.

pdntspa3• 10 months ago

Is this not an overreaction to the rubygems rubycentral fiasco?

florkbork3• 10 months ago

No.

Imagine if someone came into your house and changed all of the locks on you/your family, because "security". You had built that house from your original designs but the other party claims they own it now because they happen to manage a series of rental listings for houses built to your design. You had even made it so the plans could be copied and modified in private; if "security" were a real concern with about 10 minutes effort to do so.

Would you agree that it is right, do nothing? Or would you rebuild something new, given how little time it takes to copy the plans.

Swap "house design" for "software project" and "rental listings" for "running an instance of your software project" and you have the current situation.

Developers are free to choose the party they trust more.

pdntspa3• 10 months ago

Yeah and now we have a fragmented ecosystem. If the projects were placed under RubyCentral's management and active contributors' access is restored I don't see a big deal.

Yes the manner in which it was handled was really bad but given the supply-chain attacks we're seeing against the Python and JS worlds, I think auditing contributor access and consolidating certain privileges is prudent.

Again, handled poorly. But a lot of money rides on stuff like Bundler. We need a strict security posture.

edit- I am an artist; I get the concern and distaste. But at a certain point your art grows bigger than you. If you as a private individual build a bridge used from a public roadway and you don't do the necessary maintenance or management your shit gets shut down. Not sure how this is much different.

sergiotapia• 10 months ago

Is this political or does it have actual technical merit?

CaptainOfCoit• 10 months ago

The best "technical" benefit from this is that if one goes down, you could switch to the other in a pinch, so arguably better than the status quo even if you disagree with the organizational/"political" motives.

NARKOZ• 10 months ago

FYI, this is Ruby Central's response: https://rubycentral.org/news/our-stewardship-where-we-are-wh...

steveklabnik6• 10 months ago

This cannot be a response, as it was posted days before this was released.

dubbel• 10 months ago

The response you link to was published on September 30, 2025, so it's not the response to gem.coop? I'd say gem.coop is the response to Ruby Central's actions?

poorman• 10 months ago

Here's the thing. They could have put up link to a git repository where others can follow along with the maintenance of this project, but here isn't one. There is a list of maintainers explicitly mentioned on this page but no link to the git repository. This leads me to think this project is not about the code but about the people.

steveklabnik6• 10 months ago

Source lives here: https://github.com/gem-coop

byroot5• 10 months ago

The only public repo is a static website.

soraminazuki11• 10 months ago

It's a package repository. A link to an Ansible repository or whatever doesn't need to be in the first announcement.

This leads me to think this project is not about the code but about the people.

Trust is of utmost importance to a package repository. Even more so than code. A hostile takeover, like the one that occurred with RubyGems, fundamentally undermines that trust. In contrast, an alternative run by the original maintainers who have built years of trust, represents a positive shift.

Unfortunately, it seems that your conclusion was drawn before your justifications. When you invent justification though, at least make sure you don't undermine your own position. Where's the prominent link to the Git repo on rubygems.org top page?

https://web.archive.org/web/20251003112525/https://rubygems....

eek21213• 10 months ago

I think the issue that you overlook is that you assume this group of individuals is trustworthy.

I'm not saying they aren't, but there are a LOT of conflicting opinions about what happened, why it happened, and who was right/wrong.

This it what tends to happen when money gets involved in a project without a clear structure/business plan/guarantees put in place. People just did whatever and made assumptions, and now suddenly the whole community is rocking and rolling thanks to the actions/view points of a select few.

ChrisArchitect• 10 months ago

A brief announcement post: https://andre.arko.net/2025/10/05/announcing-gem-coop/

varispeed3• 10 months ago

initially his own, but eventually others—by paying themselves a market hourly rate

This is massively flawed thinking. So called "market rate" is actually a tool for value extraction from the workers and is not connected in any shape or form with what they create for company they work at. As corporations refer to this as if it was a consensus (as in developer should earn $x an hour), they pay this much and workers have no choice but to accept (if someone has working class background and no trust fund, it is rather impossible to throw the towel and start own business, sometimes there are even regulations designed to keep workers captive).

In such a project, "founder level" people should pay themselves as much as they think their worth is. Simple as that.

I often hear VC talking that if founder takes too much money, it's a bad look. They just want to shame people into not taking the slice they deserve.

It's interesting that IT is full of intelligent people, yet they can't grasp how they are being played by the market frames set by the rich.

eek21213• 10 months ago

hard disagree. For a project like this, all members should be paid a fair, but not "get rich" sum. There are companies out there that pay EVERYONE the same salary, all the way from CEO to janitor. Mysteriously, those companies don't have folks trying to hijack things, because nobody benefits.

It's almost like removing money from the equation stops all the nasty stuff that happens inside organizations. Who'd have thought?

varispeed3• 10 months ago

"Market rate" is not neutral. It is a wage‑fixing device that standardises labour pay while letting profits float to shareholders. Treating it as holy writ is how extraction is hidden in plain sight.

Flat salaries do not remove politics. With unequal equity and control, a flat wage simply disciplines workers while investors keep uncapped upside. If money is the poison, start by flattening carry, liquidation preferences and board vetoes. Otherwise you have only flattened one side.

Capping founder pay is class gatekeeping. It selects for people with savings or family safety nets and pushes working‑class founders out. Shaming those who take cash once they create surplus protects investor optics, not fairness.

Equal pay only makes sense when ownership, risk and power are equal. Without that, "equal pay" is theatre.

eek21213• 10 months ago

I feel like a change to the way gems are distributed/downloaded could fix this. Unfortunately, the very powers that could make that happen are the powers that control the software and infrastructure, and have the least incentive to improve things.

I honestly find it ridiculous that this situation happened to begin with, and I also have no clue why people are hating on DHH.

The easiest way to kill an open source project is drama and forking like this. Ruby has been around forever, obviously, however it is far from the most used languages, and drama like this just hurts the ecosystem as a whole.

As a former Ruby dev, it makes me sad.

bitwize• 10 months ago

Drama and forking aren't going to kill Ruby. This is a move like the one from Freenode to LiberaChat: hostile entities take over $thing, sensible people move on to $newthing, the new normal settles around $newthing.

As for DHH, he's a far-right racist.

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

Silencing and excluding such people from open source is the right thing to do because failure to do so means forcing others to interact with people who are hostile to their very existence.

colechristensen• 10 months ago

Why?

Mystery-Machine• 10 months ago

why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby

dcchambers• 10 months ago

Well the site is blocked on my company laptop (reason given: newly registered domain), so it will be a rocky start for them. I love a good vanity domain but using a traditional .org domain probably would have been better, too.

My 2c is that 95% of ruby developers aren't aware of the drama going on around Rubygems.org right now. They have probably seen emails from Ruby Central but largely ignore them and move on with life. Most people have no idea there are issues and they will just continue using Rubygems.org. Getting a project like this to critical mass is incredibly challenging.

shevy-java4• 10 months ago

There is a recent tiny "update", or more a comment - see here (I only use old.reddit; the new reddit UI is so much worse, but this is an aside):

https://old.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1nzxgb9/buckle_up_the...

In the event the ruby-reddit moderators remove it, the comment had this content verbatim at the time of linking to it here:

"I have tried so much. It’s Ruby Central that won’t talk. They’re hiding behind lawyers at this point."

Now, we have to concede that this could be wrong; or incomplete. Personally I believe him though, but in theory it could be a wrong statement. Nonetheless ... just think about this for a moment ...

The organisation that claims it is all about the community, refuses to be transparent and now hides behind lawyers, after having been caught with making several incorrect statements before already. Does this look more like a community-centric organisation or possibly a front for corporations? Just think it through for yourself what it means when they suddenly have to hide behind lawyers.

In my opinion they are now deliberately making the community angry. But, even without this, I believe we can conclude that by far the biggest fault for all of this lies on Ruby Central.

RhythmFox3• 10 months ago

-> In my opinion they are now deliberately making the community angry.

This is one thing I think hasn't been talked about explicitly enough within the community (that I see at least) yet, Ruby Central seems to be actively trolling the 'other side' of this situation. It reads to me like they know they have the lawyer power to defend their castle and are enjoying pissing down on people and telling them it's raining. Oh and you should enjoy that because it means there will be flowers soon... or something.

I think the dialogue of 'are they acting in good faith' only works in so far as they even care about the rest of the Ruby community at all. If they are indeed bad actors (motivated purely by greed, ambition, ego, etc) then they are not ever going to come clean and they would let the whole Ruby community die before they admit defeat or wrongheadedness. My favorite term for these types of actors is SCUM - Sufficiently Clever and Uncaring Malefactors.

Gem.coop

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