Ruby Central's Destructive Legacy30 Jul 2026<br>Ruby Central's Destructive Legacy<br>At conferences and meetups, and in conversations online, many Ruby developers have asked me about Ruby Central and my disagreement with them. This post is my attempt to answer the questions I&rsquo;ve been getting over and over, covering: 1) what is Ruby Central doing now? 2) has the dispute over Bundler and RubyGems been resolved? 3) what has Ruby Central said about the dispute? and 4) what can Ruby developers do now?<br>What is Ruby Central doing now?<br>To talk about what Ruby Central is doing now, we need to start with a bit of historical context. What was Ruby Central doing before this saga began? About 18 months ago, Ruby Central:<br>ran 2 conferences every year, RubyConf and RailsConf<br>had an Open Source Committee with 3 members (Ufuk, Gabi, Mike)<br>funded 7 part-time community OSS contributors (André, Arun, Ellen, Gift, Irene, Josef, Martin)<br>funded 3 full-time OSS developers (Colby, Samuel, David)<br>coordinated those 10 OSS contributors across 3 major OSS projects:RubyGems<br>Bundler<br>RubyGems.org

Then, about 10 months ago, Ruby Central began what core team member Ellen Dash called a &ldquo;hostile takeover&rdquo; of the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org open source projects, seizing control of the projects and locking out the team that had nurtured and maintained them for over a decade.<br>Today, 10 months after their takeover, Ruby Central has:<br>lost 2 of 2 conferences, after ending RailsConf, cancelling a significant portion of the last RubyConf, and providing no future conference locations or dates for the first time in decades<br>lost 2 of 3 major OSS projects, by transferring Bundler & RubyGems away to Matz<br>lost 9 of 10 contributors to open source work, including:6 of 7 operators of RubyGems.org (André, Samuel, Arun, Josef, Ellen, Martin)<br>2 of 3 full-time contributors to OSS (Samuel, David)<br>2 of 2 OSS writers (Gift, Irene)

lost 3 of 3 members of the Open Source Committee (Gabi, Mike, Ufuk)<br>lost 5 of 7 board members (Kinsey, Valerie, Naijeria, Ben, Ufuk)<br>lost 3 of 3 Executive Directors (Adarsh, Chelsea, Shan)<br>lost 2 of 2 major financial sponsors (Sidekiq and Shopify, although Shopify seemingly just returned after a 9 month break)<br>Unlike many community non-profits (including the Python Software Foundation), Ruby Central does not hold elections for their board of directors. Despite rewriting their bylaws entirely this year, new directors are still selected exclusively by existing directors, with no public process for input or feedback. The current board consists of just 2 of the 7 members who initially approved the hostile takeover, plus 3 new members chosen by the previous board (Brandon, Jey, and Ran).<br>Based on Ruby Central&rsquo;s public announcements, they have added exactly one new program after ending both conferences and transferring away half of their open source software: a new security project, funded by a grant from Alpha-Omega. The security project&rsquo;s goal is to use Anthropic&rsquo;s Project Glasswing to search for security issues in gems that have already been published. In their first monthly report for June, they reported finding a total of 5 vulnerabilities, with 1 issue at medium severity, and 4 at low or unclassified severities.<br>Ruby Central&rsquo;s current sponsorship drive, the Ruby Alliance, has found three members willing to join: Gusto, Thoughtbot, and (very recently) Shopify. What none of the sponsorship announcement posts have mentioned is that Gusto and Thoughtbot employ two of the five Ruby Central board members. David Corson-Knowles is both a board member and a Senior Staff Engineer at Gusto. Ran Craycraft is not just President of the Ruby Central board, he is also Managing Director, Americas at Thoughtbot. That means the board members who allocate the sponsorship money are also providing that sponsorship money, a conflict of interest which neither the companies nor Ruby Central have disclosed. The final sponsor is Shopify, coming back 9 months after it was reported they demanded Ruby Central start this disaster in the first place.<br>Has our dispute been resolved?<br>No, our dispute has not been resolved. Since last October, Ruby Central has been threatening to sue me. They have not withdrawn that threat as of today.<br>The core of our dispute is that last September, Ruby Central hijacked the Bundler and RubyGems GitHub projects from their maintainers of over ten years. When I informed Ruby Central that I own the name Bundler, they retaliated with a threat to sue me for supposed &ldquo;hacking&rdquo;, a position I have always disputed.<br>Ruby Central has stated they will only withdraw their threat if I drop my claim they infringed the name Bundler. After I also questioned if my work as a contractor had been allowed by state labor law, they additionally started demanding that I drop any claims regarding employment as well. So far, Ruby Central has consistently said they will only withdraw their lawsuit threat if I...