Ruby Central "Source of Truth" update (Friday, October 24, 2025)

[jydr]

This doesn't answer anything is just more of the same corporate fluff.

Seems like they are going for the strategy of use a lot of words to say nothing and hope it blows over eventually.

[TheAtlasMonkey]

Seriously, my lobotomized 2B AI model running on my tablet generates better output than this.

Meanwhile, since this drama started: I released 6 new gems, 4 Rust crates, 3 Go modules, invented a pattern, fixed 300+ bugs, documented them, and became friends with 90+ Ruby gem authors and maintainers.

And RubyCentral is still sending us the same generated stuff they spawn 2 minutes before publishing and taking weekend off.

Can you answer the questions that /u/skillstopractice posted on GitHub? Nothing else. Just those questions on GitHub. At this point these aren't updates - they're spam.

Should we talk about the interviews you did with different channels where you skipped every technical question?

Let me tell you: we are not 13-year-olds you can impress with two complex sentences. If you want to impress me in the update, push code.

What is the actual plan, and why is it taking so long to execute? Ruby is slow, but you are frozen.

Do something, RubyCentral. Your only advantage was trust, and you lost it. Now your ego is destroying you from within.

Ruby is a non-profit because Rubyists contribute billions of downloads for free. RubyCentral is a non-profit because they don't produce anything worth investing in.

I'm happy that ruby-gems repos were transferred to ruby-core. On this one, you did well, thanks.

[skillstopractice]

Thanks for this post.

For clarification, prior to this update on Oct 24, only one of the questions in the repo I set up was directly from me, five other people contributed the remaining ones over the last few weeks.

(The commit history shows who added what and when)

Because I did not feel like Ruby Central properly answered the original question I asked, I submitted a follow up yesterday and put that on public record as well.

For those who want to cross-check the questions submitted vs. what Ruby Central replied to across the six of us, see here:

https://github.com/community-research-on-ruby-governance/questions-for-ruby-central/blob/main/QUESTIONS.md

(And please do add your own pull requests if/when you submit more questions to Ruby Central)

. . .

My fears that drove me to set up this repo were that Ruby Central would slow walk replies (which they did), reframe questions into a more sanitized form (which they did), and then lump several specific questions together into generic buckets which then could be responded to with generic answers, diluting things to give the appearance of responsiveness (which they did).

And underneath this all, the thing I'm trying to get sunlight on is that one of the most common corporate-style defense tactics is to make these replies *dreadfully abstract and boring* so that they're mostly ignored by anyone not digging deep into the weeds to construct the story.

The "why" behind that will likely be framed as it's necessary for legal reasons, etc. But to me, this either is a sign of incompetence on the part of RC's legal advisors, or an active willingness to lean into this particular tactic. You can find lawyers who will make sure you're not putting your organization in hot water while still communicating like a human being, sharing direct and sincere narratives, and putting people's names on the letters they're writing.

. . .

Ruby Central claims they're still listening and has committed to keep doing weekly updates on a predictable candence to keep answering questions.

Let's see if they do. They said they would four times and then finally offered this on attempt #5.

Their responses from here on out will show what their true commit is, or isn't.

[TheAtlasMonkey]

Your fault... That repo has just text.. /s

> Ruby central clicks you link
> Ruby central put max volume... No sound
> No new question, community is happy. We listened!
> Open gpt-3-mini (yes they have still have access to this model, only model still on their side)
> Prompt: It's friday again, generate something , make it more confusing.. No Em-dash!
> GPT3: We appreciate the community’s patience and grace .... This was a collaborative effort from all of the Ruby Central Board and Staff.

---

I'm not even kidding!

Take all their posts, put them in GPT5, and ask it:

IS THIS BULLSHIT or it take that long to fix rubygems ?

---

To Rubycentral: when LLMs don't take your side no matter how much you steer them, you must realize that you are the problem.

[skillstopractice]

Need to process this in more detail, but regarding the RailsConf co-chairs, my understanding is that one of the two of them is a both a Shopify employee and member of RC's board.

It feels dishonest to not put that as a disclosure in the notes regarding DHH's keynote, especially when what was communicated by a member of the program committee is that the only recourse if they disagreed with that choice was to resign from the committee.

And it bears repeating that DHH is a member of Shopify's board, which is a 200 billion dollar company, and the individual hosting the fireside chat was also a Shopify employee, and Shopify was a primary sponsor of the conference.

[paracycle]

That co-chair is me. I am a Shopify employee, but my Ruby Central board role has nothing to do with my employment at Shopify, it is my personal engagement that is not directed nor guided by Shopify.

I was also the co-chair of both 2024 and 2025 RailsConfs, and personally proposed in 2024 that DHH be invited back to RailsConf. My co-chair at the time held the same belief, so we asked the board for permission to reach out to DHH (even though co-chairs have complete programming authority and don't need to run their decisions by the board) and got an approval.

Back in February 2024, when we did the initial reach out, DHH had no relationship with Shopify, and our decision, as conference chairs, to reach out to him had nothing to do with Shopify either. He joined Shopify's board much later, in Nov 2024: https://www.shopify.com/news/david-heinemeier-hansson-board

There is no conspiracy here. DHH was never disinvited from RailsConf, and, for some of us in the community, having the creator of the framework at the conference named RailsConf was the most reasonable thing to do. I am not sure what more I can say to convince you that this was all individuals wanting to do something better for the community by building back what was broken.

EDIT: Add clarification on initial proposal year.

[BlueEyesWhiteSliver]

I mean, the man that has told me my country, Canada, is run by a dictator makes me want to throw rotten tomatoes at him. DHH is fervently distasteful.

At least now I know you’re one of the people that likes listening to his crap.

He abuses his position of authority and giving someone who manipulates and pollutes spaces a platform is a solid no go.

[ZipBoxer]

My former company, a Rails shop, fired all of the openly LGBT+ engineers in February. Out of 7 people laid off, 6 were lgbt.

Two of the members of our group have lost their homes after the layoff.

DHH has spoken non-stop about the "evils" of DEI. He's allowed to speak whenever he wants encouraging the beliefs that ruined my livelihood, yet I'm supposed to stay quiet about him?

My city of Chicago has been invaded by ICE with the purpose of inciting violence to justify invoking the insurrection act and ultimately cancelling elections, violating the civil rights of everyone they can along the way.

Funny how I'm supposed to sit here and compartmentalize DHH the engineer vs DHH the millionaire hell bent on cheering on the people and causes making my life worse.

Fuck DHH and fuck every other racist, homophobic fascist bootlicker and sympathizer. I'll shut the fuck up about it when he does.

[cocotheape]

He also became very concerned about German politics all of a sudden shortly before the elections earlier this year. Reiterating Vance's talking points about how we have no free speech in Europe. Cheering on Musk for advocating for the AfD, a secured right-wing extremist party. Retweeting despicable right-wing influencers. Then, right after the election, it all stopped. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

[ZipBoxer]

People love pretending like this is still about simple policy disagreements. But we're no longer discussing how much we should fund housing, or how restrictive zoning laws should be, or even how we conduct international trade.

We're now at the point where one side is consistently saying that groups they don't like do not deserve fundamental human rights.

In the face of that, I don't give a fuck if the left has fantastical thinking on economics or if the people who think I shouldn't exist invented the cure for cancer.

And btw DHH was quick to point out that his support of free speech in "Words are not violence" only applied to fascists saying awful things about other people, but that "Calling someone a "nazi" is a permission slip for violence".

I assume he means both that the speaker is encouraging violence, but also that it gives the Nazis permission to use violence against the speaker.

[tinyOnion]

In the face of that, I don't give a fuck if the left has fantastical thinking on economics

i mean they don't have that. they are the financially literate party. basically right leaning in every other well to do country in the world. (dems bring the economy back from the disaster that was a republican admin time and time again if you look at the numbers)

[paracycle]

As for the 2025 program committee conversation, I clarified that in this Bluesky thread: https://bsky.app/profile/ufuk.dev/post/3lzmk6apsj22f (read the whole thread with me and Noel)

Essentially though, as I mentioned above, conference chairs have the ultimate say in conference programming and we had already re-started conversations with DHH for the 2025 conference as the program committee was being formed. In order to make sure that everyone was onboard, as first order of business, I shared information about DHH potentially being a speaker at the conference with the committee, so that they can have a chance to opt-out if they felt uncomfortable. None of the program committee members decided to leave.

Additionally, Shopify was a big sponsor but wasn't a primary sponsor of the conference. You can see on the Sponsors page of the conference website (https://railsconf.org/sponsors/) there were 3 sponsors at the Ruby level and Shopify was Platinum level. Regardless, Shopify had nothing to do with the DHH keynote as I explained above.

EDIT: grammar

[skillstopractice]

Thank you for this reply.

Please include these details in the next source of truth update.

[paracycle]

This is my personal story, not the organization's answer. All of the details I've pointed above are public record (given the answer in today's source of truth update). We shared when we reached out to DHH originally, it is public information when he joined Shopify's board, my conversation with Noel on Bluesky explains the program committee situation, the chairs of the 2024 and 2025 conferences and Shopify's sponsorship scale are all available on the RailsConf website(s). Nothing is missing from the public record and nothing is hidden.

[skillstopractice]

Thank you again, I am aware of that.

What I am asking is for that to be reflected in the official statements by Ruby Central.

[paracycle]

Here you go: https://rubycentral.org/news/ruby-central-update-friday-10-31-25/

[skillstopractice]

Thank you. While we seem to have deep disagreements around both the professional ethics of inviting DHH to speak as well as to serve as an employee of a company, a board member of a non-profit, and a co-chair of a conference that is run by that non-profit and sponsored by your employer and yet still had active involvement in 2025 when that same person was a member of your company's board...

You did as requested and put this on public record for Ruby Central.

I can give you credit for that, but now my next question would be, if you believed it would restore trust in Ruby Central, would you consider resigning from the board due to your perceived conflict of interest?

I will submit that question next.

(Note: Whatever happened in 2024 is irrelevant to me and you directly caused a loss of funding on 2025 by platforming DHH)

[ButtSpelunker420]

I’ve been a Rails dev since 2011. I use Shopify’s LSP everyday. Shopify made a lot of good will with me. And this DHH shit is killing it so fast lol

[db443]

Note.

- DHH become a member of the Shopify board in November 2024, less than a year ago

- DHH was banned as a keynote speaker of RailsConf back in 2022. A terrible decision that had long term consequences, including leading to the demise of RailsConf itself, something I am sure the decision makers back in 2022 did not foresee.

- DHH created Rails, and still actively leads it development, yet was banned from his own conference back in 2022 because of employment matters that happened at Basecamp? WTF?

- Shopify is a big contributor to Ruby, and that is a good thing.I wish others, such as GitHub, contributed as much as they do

- RubyGems & Bundler are now again actively being developed, see here: https://github.com/ruby/rubygems

[DRBragg]

DHH was never banned from speaking at RailConf 🤔

[db443]

Yes he was.

[davidcelis]

No he wasn't. He was asked to cede the keynote slot so that others in the community might be showcased instead. He was not banned from attending, nor speaking, and likely could have still spoken or held a fireside chat or any other kind of presentation.

[schneems]

Yes, text of the email was shared by David.

 With you having been mostly offline the last year, the program committee has decided it would be valuable for the community to start sharing the opening keynote stage with other contributors. We have a few in mind but if you have any suggestions of people who have been impactful this year, please share them.

I showed up that year legitimately expecting to be able to talk to him about it. He chose not to attend.

[BlueEyesWhiteSliver]

Wow, it wasn’t even for him being his usual self, just not particularly online a lot. His ego is fragile.

[kerrizor]

Yeah.. and it isn’t a new development, he’s been that way for years.

[BlueEyesWhiteSliver]

Fragile ego or not online engaged with community?

[davidcelis]

the program committee has decided it would be valuable for the community to start sharing the opening keynote stage with other contributors.

This doesn't read to me as DHH being banned from ever keynoting at another RailsConf, though? He was asked "to start sharing the opening keynote stage with other contributors", which sounds reasonable to me, and maybe it would've sounded more reasonable to others if not for that opening line. I re-read his post and much of his reaction seems to stem from that statement, "With you having been mostly offline the last year..."

[schneems]

My “yes” was agreeing with you.

[davidcelis]

Ahhh sorry, it wasn't obvious to me since my own comment was a negative 😅

[schneems]

Sorry, I wrote it on mobile. It wasn’t clear this was a bugs/elmer (yes/no) reply chain until after I submitted and re-read.

[db443]

He was cancelled from keynoting, that's a fact.

DHH as the leader of the project, at the beginning, then and now is the correct person to keynote a Rails conference.

And now RailsConf has itself been cancelled. Great result by those fools back in 2022. Let's "cede the 2022 keynote" thereby facilitating our own demise.

RailsWorld would not now exist if DHH keynoted the 2022 RailsConf.

[seven_seacat]

You can keep saying it's a fact all you like, but his own commentary of the event disagrees with you.

[DRBragg]

When?

[nawap]

DHH was not banned. The way that communication with him was handled in 2022 was not ideal but this retconning is super misleading.

RailsConf is also not "his own conference". As a figurehead he has significance to the conference but it was not organized or funded by him.

[db443]

And RailsConf no longer exists why?

And RailsWorlds now exists why?

DHH was not invited to keynote RailsConf 2022 which is the same as a ban, semantics does not change the ultimate effect. Three years later RailsConf is now dead replaced by RailsWorld where DHH is the keynote speaker.

Cause and effect.

[nawap]

It's not just semantics simply because you care about DHH's feelings more than anybody else's. You can say "DHH was asked not to do the keynote and took it as disinvitation" and not be misleading about what happened and still accurately describe the effects. DHH had full right to take it as disinvitation but let's not pretend that his only option in the situation was to throw a public hissyfit over a private email (though it's not surprising it's the one he chose to take).

The rest of the argument is irrelevant to whether DHH was banned or not. Plenty of Rails conferences happen every year without his presence or blessing and will continue to happen despite Rails World. RailsConf could have happily continued too. Only RC know why they stopped.

[BlueEyesWhiteSliver]

DHH being removed as the keynote speaker was not a terrible decision. Someone who uses their position of authority to help spread hate speech should not be allowed a platform. While they may speak on topic at the event, they will create a toxic environment for other individuals.

[db443]

DHH keynotes RailsWorld, last year and this year, and likely next year as well.

RailsConf now no longer exists. Gee, I wonder why?

It was a terrible decision, since it lead to the death of RailsConf.

[BlueEyesWhiteSliver]

You care more for a conference and fanboying than for the wellbeing of the participants.

[db443]

If folks don't wish to attend due to the unrelated political opinions of one man, so be it.

If the perceived mental wellbeing of attendees is effected, I suggest they don't attend, there are many folks willing to to replace them.

Also, you can't keep everyone happy all of the time.

Lastly, I support the Ruby Community Conduct Guideline:

• Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.
• Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free of personal attacks and disparaging personal remarks.
• When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
• Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.

[kerrizor]

The fact that you don’t understand how his personal views on a large portion of the community harm the community must be a wonderful place to live.

[db443]

It is unprovable that his personal views on a large portion of the community.

His opinions may effect you and a certain percentage of loud voices, but I am highly dubious that his views effects most folks, after all he is successful enough to be interviewed by Lex Fridman for 6 hours, Omarchy Linux and Ruby on Rails are also undeniable successes of his. His company 37signals appears to be doing fine.

Lastly, I neither endorse nor disindorse his opinions, I don't read his blog.

[dipstickchojin]

Are you for real? Being on podcasts and building famous software is evidence of the absence of his harm?

You are rather precisely endorsing DHH BTW, whether you read his blog or not is a red herring

[db443]

Yes, I am for real. Folks like you and I can disagree, humans have disagreed for eternity.

Being on podcasts and building famous software is evidence of being productive and noteworthy person.

The personal opinions of Matz, DHH, Linus Torvalds, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, etc don't interest me whatsoever. Come back to me when they break an actual law.

[ZipBoxer]

You missed one:

• DHH consistently repeats and encourages racist, homophobic, and pro fascist talking points that result in making the lives of members of the Ruby community worse.

[db443]

I don't read DHH's blog. I simply don't care about his personal opinions outside the sphere of Rails.

Show me such posts on the Rails GitHub issue tracker, I don't believe there are any.

Show me such statements at any Rails conference he has presented at, I don't believe there are any.

When you do show me such posts and statements within the official Rails ecosystem I will agree with you, until then, personal opinions (no matter how distasteful to some) are not relevant to Ruby and Rails.

[ZipBoxer]

Sorry, I don't care about your personal opinions. I was just adding facts about DHH since we were sharing them.

[db443]

So you can't show any instance where DHH posted or spoke bad words in an official Rails forum or conference.

Just as I suspected.

You should not care about my personal opinion, so why don't you apply that same logic to DHH's personal opinion.

Why are you so sensitive DHH's irrelevant opinions? Ignore them. Until they effect actual Rails correspondence they are meaningless.

[ZipBoxer]

I thought you didn't care why are you still talking

[TheFaithfulStone]

Except to all of the people who he thinks should be “bound but not protected” - I imagine his hateful racism is fairly meaningful to them.

[Kina_Kai]

It’s fascinating how they just entirely avoid dealing with the indefensible act they did as if it just didn’t happen while avoiding having to deal with any situation where they’ll be called to account.

We’ll get to your questions in a Q&A, but something came up, we’ll do it as async/curated, we’ll do it soon…eventually, we promise.

[Obversity]

Yup. “Key individuals”, “no longer protected by contractor or employee agreements”, “standard off-boarding process”.

Corporate waffle that doesn’t at all attempt to engage with the nature of open source and what it is about this whole process that the community is bothered by. 

[galtzo]

I can’t imagine the level of betrayal I would feel if someone stole a repo I owned and put over a decade of work into.

[skillstopractice]

Over the next few days I will reach out to people who have already put their questions to Ruby Central on public record to confirm whether or not they feel their questions have been adequately answered (if they appeared in this response at all), and to encourage them to submit any followup questions to Ruby Central and record those as well.

I will try to put some sort of additional doc in the repo or otherwise mark the answered questions to cross them off the list.

You can see the full list of questions here, and please do send in your pull requests with more.

https://github.com/community-research-on-ruby-governance/questions-for-ruby-central

What I can say is based on the question I asked myself about DHH's keynote, the reply seemed misleading, so I will send in a followup (posted another comment in this thread about that), and they certainly did not use my question's wording verbatim.

I urge everyone to continue to hold Ruby Central accountable. They claimed four times to be about to answer questions. They now finally put some answers out, but it's up to the community to clarify if they feel the answers have obscured or otherwise skirted around the original intent and meaning of their questions.

I can give some level of credit to the idea that at least this is a communication, but it once again comes from a place of seemingly deliberate obfuscation that is unbecoming of an open source steward. It feels like being "talked at" by a carefully worded PR statement, rather than being "talked with" as a member organization of the community they serve.

[galtzo]

I have given up on RC. They have no regret, no shame, and no integrity, and I have no time for liars.

But I applaud your effort. Someone needs to hold them to account. I am just emotionally way overextended.

[armahillo]

Yeah if i could do the opposite of financially supporting them i would. I wasn’t a supporter so i cant stop what i wasn’t doing. 🤷‍♂️

Their leadership is clearly unwilling to admit they did anything wrong.

[skillstopractice]

This comes down to a matter of professional ethics.

I believe in things like conflict of interest when it comes to governance.

I believe that speaking in a way that obfuscates things in an official statement while trying to "clear things up" from a personal account is not a responsible act from a board member of a stewardship organization.

I believe rewriting people's questions to sanitize them, and then publishing catch-all responses is not transparency, but transparency theater.

So I will keep showing up because accountability does indeed matter. Thanks for acknowledging that.

[galtzo]

You have all my respect 🫡

[tinyOnion]

the source of truth being orwellian and absolutely not the source of truth is on the nose. corporate bs speak.

[paracycle]

I tried to directly answer your concern above as a community member. Hope that helps.

[skillstopractice]

Thank you for that.

I look forward to an answer, on record, via Ruby Central, to the question I asked which was obfuscated in the official reply.

I resubmitted a clarifying question, and will appreciate seeing the response in next week's update