I can see a lot of time was put into the report, and it helps to have the detail, but in my mind it glosses over one of the most important parts: The dispute in the stewardship of the bundler and rubygems open-source projects.
As I understand it, Ruby Central controlled the rubygems and bundler github organizations, but did not "own" the projects in the traditional sense - the individual contributers have copyright on the code, and potentially even trademark rights. By then removing access of core maintainers to those projects, they removed access to something they don't "own" themselves.
This is all complicated by the fact that controlling a github organization or repo is different from owning the trademark or copyright. But some of the original maintainers clearly felt they had more of a right to those projects than Ruby Central did.
I believe not clarifying this before making these access changes was the biggest mistake that Ruby Central made, and it's not even mentioned in this report.
I don't have much skin in the game but as a passerby, I agree that the report obviously was made with a lot of time/effort but wouldn't dramatically change someone's view of Ruby Central or assure anyone this won't happen again. This is like writing an outage postmortem without really getting to the root cause and identifying what can be done to prevent in the future.
This incident involved many people over a rather long time scale, and it was important to detangle how people perceived events from how they actually unfolded. The subject matter is deeply subjective, and multiple failed attempts at writing this doc came as a result of aiming for objectivity, for blameless representation. Therefore, those named in this report are:
- Full-time employees of Ruby Central
- Part-time consultants who were involved in access discussions
- Anyone who made an access change from September 10th-18th, 2025
- Those who have already been publicly identified in the discourse
Volunteer groups, including the Ruby Central Board and the Open Source Software (OSS) Committee, are listed, but their actions are represented as a group. Individual quotes from the OSS Committee are used without direct attribution when they represent a general consensus.
Some execution failures and mistakes are individual, but the purpose of having a foundation and having an institution is that it can rise above individual limitations and provide robust, fault-tolerant systems. Therefore, these are our mistakes, collectively. And collectively we'll learn from them, but only if we face what happened, what we meant to do, and where we fell short.
The hope is that by sharing this, we can provide some closure to the community and increase transparency
The undeniable effect of masking specific comments made by OSS committee members is to protect three members (2 current, 1 former) of Shopify's technical leadership around Ruby and Rails, who have all since left the committee. The one who left Shopify went to 37signals after.
You’d think that name, Shopify, would appear three times, once per employee/committee member. Or just once, to say the entire OSS committee was employed by Shopify, if we’re still identifying the group strictly as a group. Either would be fine.
This is a disappointing look for Ruby Central. I have to get back to work, but their retroactive framing that Andre and Samuel's work on RV justified Ruby Central's subsequent actions is contradicted by their own admissions.
By their own admission, André is a contractor to Ruby Central. Contractors, especially under California law, have no contractual obligation of confidentiality to the other party unless there's a pre-existing agreement in place. They later admit in this "incident report" that they didn't have any legal agreements with André in place, so there's no basis for claiming André couldn't work on rv.
Samuel was an employee, not a contractor, but [California Bus. & Prof. Code § 16600](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....) voids non-compete agreements—so even as an employee, he had every right to work on a competing project. There's no indication that he used Ruby Central's proprietary information to do so, and the report doesn't allege that. I have little doubt that if Samuel or André used proprietary information to develop rv, they would have already presented evidence of that.
Independent of the legalese, a "uv but for ruby" is a blindingly obvious thing to do, and Ruby Central doesn't get to lick the cookie and get upset when an independent contractor—Ruby Central's own characterization—does a thing they didn't fund.
My sourcing on this is that I run a 10-person business with employees in California. I'm not a lawyer, but I looked over enough of this paperwork that I feel confident opining on an internet forum.
That wasn't my read of what the postmortem is claiming. I didn't see a claim that anyone did anything illegal with proprietary information and the only legal question anyone raised was around a tangentially related proposal with user data[1]. I think the question about working on competing work is unfortunately more grey than most on HN would like, but even then nobody was fired/terminated for that. It sounds like people voluntarily left.
My biggest takeaway from this is the intermingling of opensource work/foundations/companies and employees/contractors/volunteers needs to be incredibly explicit. It sounds like everyone had very different expectations about what this group of people was (ranging from an exclusive club of influential ruby developers to a very formal, business-like foundation) and, as a result, each other's actions seemed hostile/strange/confusing.
[1] I actually think the comments about the proposal of selling the user data does a disservice to the postmortem. I think it invokes a much more emotional reaction from the reader than anything else and, while potentially interesting, seems like dirty laundry that doesn't change the lesson the postmortem teaches.
The document didn't mention a lawsuit and I was just responding to the above comment with only the context of the postmortem and pointing out that this particular article didn't claim anything illegal happened. You and some others here might have much more context that I or other readers of this postmortem don't have.
I seem to remember there were some threats of legal action related to unauthorized access after this kerfuffle but I a) don't know what is going on with that, b) don't know what the law actually says about that and c) don't know if that is what you are referring to. If so, I think it is different than what the original comment alleged which was more about moonlighting/using proprietary information/competing. I think that topic is extremely complicated (e.g. I am not so sure moonlighting for a competitor while an employee is necessarily protected in California...) but that wasn't alleged in the postmortem anyway.
uv is Astral's onramp to paying customers. Without uv's tight integration with Astral's other tooling that they want to charge for, they wouldn't be able to sell anything. Building a business around doing the same for Ruby may be within their rights, but it's absolutely a conflict of interest working or contracted by Ruby Central. Removing them was an obvious move.
If this is a conflict of interest, then any Ruby core systems being controlled predominantly by members of the Shopify dev team is itself a conflict of interest. I am fine saying 'we need to make sure these libraries stay independent and community controlled', but that is so clearly not what was going on here. Believing that is just letting the RC FUD and PR control your thinking on the narrative.
I'm sorry but what are Shopify's business activities that directly compete with services provided/maintained by RubyCentral?
As far as arguments about community, Shopify IS the community by virtue of being the ones putting up pretty much all the money to keep this ship afloat.
If you don't have skin in the game your positions won't be taken seriously.
Depending on your point of view, Sidekiq either turned their back on the community or tried to start a coup by pulling funding just so they could morally grandstand.
That attitude is exactly the problem. Shopify does not 'keep the ship afloat' they are just a corporation using open source systems as the foundation of their business. Competition is not by definition the backing of a 'conflict of interest', it legally refers to a person or entity with a stake in a particular outcome having control of the means to achieve that which are not legally sound , ie compromise their judgment. I think Shopify's judgement of what 'is good for the Ruby community' is severely compromised by their corporate interests, and probably by their boards political interests as well. Hence, why they are trying so hard to justify removing Andre.
Do you have any idea how expensive it is to keep the infrastructure running? RubyCentral's operating expenses are in the millions every year and exceed their revenue.
Andre's removal is easily justifiable by his own (lengthy history of) sketchy behavior.
Since when is "open source" something businesses shouldn't be allowed to get value from or even have a stake in? These things are MIT licensed. That's free as in speech AND beer. If you don't like the freedoms of the license and how other people use them, don't use the license. If you don't like someone's stewardship, fork and maintain your own.
Responding to your first paragraph, the rest wasn’t constructive.
Shopify paying for infrastructure related to Ruby is an investment, not charity. Hosting gems costs money and a healthy community depends on that gem hosting. Spotify, in turn, depends on that healthy community to produce and maintain gems, train future employees, stuff like that. They’re not paying that money for fun, it is to protect their interests.
Those who write the code have more of a right than those who pay the bills. Anyone can write a check. A select few have the acumen and experience to actually write the code.
You can't unilaterally declare someone "sketchy" and then kick them out in the name of conveience.
As I understand it, Ruby Central controlled the rubygems and bundler github organizations, but did not "own" the projects in the traditional sense - the individual contributers have copyright on the code, and potentially even trademark rights. By then removing access of core maintainers to those projects, they removed access to something they don't "own" themselves.
This is all complicated by the fact that controlling a github organization or repo is different from owning the trademark or copyright. But some of the original maintainers clearly felt they had more of a right to those projects than Ruby Central did.
I believe not clarifying this before making these access changes was the biggest mistake that Ruby Central made, and it's not even mentioned in this report.
They're not the original authors of Rubygems so it's doubtful.
By their own admission, André is a contractor to Ruby Central. Contractors, especially under California law, have no contractual obligation of confidentiality to the other party unless there's a pre-existing agreement in place. They later admit in this "incident report" that they didn't have any legal agreements with André in place, so there's no basis for claiming André couldn't work on rv.
Samuel was an employee, not a contractor, but [California Bus. & Prof. Code § 16600](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....) voids non-compete agreements—so even as an employee, he had every right to work on a competing project. There's no indication that he used Ruby Central's proprietary information to do so, and the report doesn't allege that. I have little doubt that if Samuel or André used proprietary information to develop rv, they would have already presented evidence of that.
Independent of the legalese, a "uv but for ruby" is a blindingly obvious thing to do, and Ruby Central doesn't get to lick the cookie and get upset when an independent contractor—Ruby Central's own characterization—does a thing they didn't fund.
My sourcing on this is that I run a 10-person business with employees in California. I'm not a lawyer, but I looked over enough of this paperwork that I feel confident opining on an internet forum.
My biggest takeaway from this is the intermingling of opensource work/foundations/companies and employees/contractors/volunteers needs to be incredibly explicit. It sounds like everyone had very different expectations about what this group of people was (ranging from an exclusive club of influential ruby developers to a very formal, business-like foundation) and, as a result, each other's actions seemed hostile/strange/confusing.
[1] I actually think the comments about the proposal of selling the user data does a disservice to the postmortem. I think it invokes a much more emotional reaction from the reader than anything else and, while potentially interesting, seems like dirty laundry that doesn't change the lesson the postmortem teaches.
I seem to remember there were some threats of legal action related to unauthorized access after this kerfuffle but I a) don't know what is going on with that, b) don't know what the law actually says about that and c) don't know if that is what you are referring to. If so, I think it is different than what the original comment alleged which was more about moonlighting/using proprietary information/competing. I think that topic is extremely complicated (e.g. I am not so sure moonlighting for a competitor while an employee is necessarily protected in California...) but that wasn't alleged in the postmortem anyway.
As far as arguments about community, Shopify IS the community by virtue of being the ones putting up pretty much all the money to keep this ship afloat.
If you don't have skin in the game your positions won't be taken seriously.
Depending on your point of view, Sidekiq either turned their back on the community or tried to start a coup by pulling funding just so they could morally grandstand.
Andre's removal is easily justifiable by his own (lengthy history of) sketchy behavior.
Since when is "open source" something businesses shouldn't be allowed to get value from or even have a stake in? These things are MIT licensed. That's free as in speech AND beer. If you don't like the freedoms of the license and how other people use them, don't use the license. If you don't like someone's stewardship, fork and maintain your own.
Shopify paying for infrastructure related to Ruby is an investment, not charity. Hosting gems costs money and a healthy community depends on that gem hosting. Spotify, in turn, depends on that healthy community to produce and maintain gems, train future employees, stuff like that. They’re not paying that money for fun, it is to protect their interests.
You can't unilaterally declare someone "sketchy" and then kick them out in the name of conveience.