Here’s my attempt to explain the situation in a brief way. DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, wrote some things which are considered racist by some people. This caused a prominent Ruby programmer to withdraw his large sponsorship of Ruby Central, a non-profit which organises Ruby conferences, because DHH spoke at one of their conferences. Therefore Ruby Central ended up very dependent on Shopify, a large company, for funding. One theory (mentioned in the article) is that Shopify (where DHH is a board member) then pressured Ruby Central to perform a “hostile takeover” of the RubyGems GitHub organisation, where they revoked the maintainer privileges of long-time contributors. What is RubyGems? It’s a website which is the de facto standard source for “gems”, which are Ruby packages. I guess this is equivalent to NPM in the Node/JavaScript world.
If you want to know the potentially racist stuff said by DHH, he essentially seemed to be unhappy that London is “no longer full of native Brits”. He says “native Brits” now make up “about a third” of London. So by “native Brits” he seems to mean the White British ethnic group, because they made up 37% of London in the 2021 census.
The Ruby programmer who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: “I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak. We cannot tolerate hateful people as leaders in our communities.”
The “hostile takeover” of RubyGems has led some Ruby programmers to create an alternative to the RubyGems website. This alternative is gem.coop. Also there is an open letter signed by influential Ruby programmers which calls for Ruby on Rails to be forked so that DHH no longer has an association with it.
The article that this post links to is an update to the situation: Ruby Central is now taking steps to try and cool the controversy.
Thoughts on this?
Edit: fixed typo.
Ah yes and he appears to be a Tommy Robson apologist as well. He’s definitely been a racist, that is absolutely not something you can take out of context.
Racists defending racism? Nothing new here.
The edited quotes from OP are bad enough but they’re even worse in context:
I thought I might move [to London] one day. That was then. Now, I wouldn’t dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it’s no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
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That frustration was on wide display in Tommy Robinson’s march yesterday. British and English flags flying high and proud, like they would in Copenhagen on the day of a national soccer match. Which was both odd to see but also heartwarming.
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[transphobia]
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I really feel for the Brits because it’s not obvious how they get themselves out of this pickle. They’re still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls.
GTFO with this scumbag whitewash. Ofc it’s a “moderatecentrist”. Fash troll garbage.
DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, wrote some things which are considered racist by some people.
Yeah fuck of with that “some people” lmao
Well racists are probably ok with it. It’s amazing how annoyed they get if you actually call them racist though.
I’m not a fascist or a troll, and if someone wants to read exactly what DHH wrote, then they can click on the link to his blog post, which is in my summary. I think it’s good that you’re quoting more of it to be honest, so people can see what he wrote, and they can decide for themselves what they think about it. I’m not trying to “whitewash” anything, I just wanted to give people an overview of the situation so they can draw their own conclusions, whether positive or negative.
It’s the conservatives and reform who called it “understandable frustration” everyone else calls it an excuse for violent thuggery.
I think it’s in the nature of capital cities that they tend to attract quite a lot of people who want to try “life in the city” for a while and then move on? I’ve a few friends who moved down to London to see if they could make it in the music industry, which they did not, and then moved on to somewhere else with a less insane cost of living, after a decade or so. I’d observe that, while there’s quite a lot of Brits in London, there’s a massive shortage of Londoners. When people have kids, they generally want a bigger house somewhere with a decent school nearby, which in many cases means moving to the outskirts, or to a different city altogether.
That’s very much to London’s benefit, though. They have everything that you can imagine; specialist shops of every variety, and opportunities in every industry. However, I don’t think ‘London weighting’ of wages is really sufficient. Even if the wages are eg. 20% more for doing the ‘same job’ as the rest of the UK, you aren’t going to get a lot for that, and a lot of people in entry-level jobs are going to be living in big shared houses and struggling to scrape by, until they find the experience/inclination to leave. That’s a tale as old as time, tho, and probably to the benefit of the city - without a massive turnover of people, wages would probably need to be even higher.
Diversity is strength. If you don’t like that, then a bustling metropolitan capital city is not for you, and London is no exception. They’ve a nice bridge for the racists to throw themselves off; cry while you do, dickheads.
I know quite a few people that work in London but live in the Midlands, precisely so they can have a nice house. For them, it’s worth the commute.
Find a nice house in London costs millions, so you would have to have a sing significant pay hike in order to make it work.
I’m just thankful I’m not a Ruby programmer.
Programmers don’t care. This is just some drama for people that like drama.
You don’t knowany programmers, do you?
I know plenty and they don’t care. Lemmy is a bubble where people pay attention to those things. Outside of it no one cares.
If a bubble contains the majority is it still a bubble?
Programmers are more likely to be LGBTQ then in the average population, it’s just one of those industries that tends to attract. So yeah, I think they probably do care about this, otherism is something that they have experience with.
Probably depends on where you check the data but some surveys show that while 10% of general population identify as LGBTQ (https://news.gallup.com/poll/332522/percentage-americans-lgbt.aspx) only 5% of programmers do (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ons-data-gay-lesbian-bisexual-jobs-b2436332.html). So it’s a very weak argument.
The fact that you think 5% of population somehow shapes how “majority” thinks shows how deep in the bubble you are. Most programmers just code for work, they don’t care who contributed to the libraries they use.
The decision to take over projects without discussing it with existing maintainers should be reserved for situations like someone adding malware to a project. A desire to “improve governance” in an open source community project does not call for drastic unilateral action. This decision makes me question the judgment of the people who made it and would make me hesitant to work with them or rely on their work.
It looks like Matz, the creator of Ruby is now overseeing things. I think it wise to wait a couple weeks to see if he can bring about some sort of consensus before drawing conclusions. Rumor has it, he’s nice.
DHH doesn’t seem nice. I’d be happy about a change to Rails governance.
For DHH context, I’ll link this open letter
An open letter to the Rails Core team and Ruby community
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) has publicly published writings that make clear he holds racist and transphobic views, as well as a number of other traits undesirable in any figurehead and community leader.
We, the undersigned, call upon the Rails Core team and the wider Ruby community, to:
- cut ties with DHH and his work from this point forward
- hard fork Rails and associated projects to a new name and development free from his influence
- adopt a modern Code of Conduct with suitable community governance
It has three source links on ‘racist’, ‘transphobic’, and ‘undesirable’ if you want to form your own opinion.
Related to DHH, there’s also been controversies on Omarchy/Hyprland recently (post from 8 days ago). That source has a lot more information and historical/personal experience on DHH.
You might’ve noticed Framework, the laptop manufacturer, embroiled in a controversy as of now. The Discord server is on lockdown because the volunteer moderation team has gone on hiatus, and the Framework forum post about the controversy has been gaining unsightly amounts of steam from people disappointed at actions taken by Framework.
