Trouble in Ruby land

Increasing amount of challenges are seen with Open Source projects when larger corporations are ruling over community-focused projects. Ruby community has been having massive trouble in the recent weeks after Ruby Central claimed ownership over other people’s contributions.

After Marty Haught’s hostile takeover of RubyGems’ infrastructure, André Arko (the long term maintainer of Bundler) published a blog post “Goodbye, RubyGems” describing that “RubyGems team is no more”. Ellen Dash describes what happened (PDF file) in more detail:

“On September 18th, with no explanation, Marty Haught revoked GitHub organization membership for all admins on the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org maintainer teams. By doing this, he took control for himself and other full-time employees of Ruby Central.”

To make things more clear, André Arko has applied for Bundler trademark. He also aims to eventually transfer ownership of the trademark to a community-focused Ruby organization, when that kind of suitable organization (hopefully…) happens to exist in the future.