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who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: “I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak.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.
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.