The Rubygems.org takeover

Summary

Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! By Joe BrockmeierOctober 20, 2025 In September, a group of long-time maintainers of Ruby packaging tools projects had their GitHub privileges revoked by nonprofit corporation Ruby Central in what many people are calling a hostile takeover. Ruby Central and its board members have issued several public statements that have, so far, failed to satisfy many in the Ruby community. In response, some of the former contributors to RubyGems are working on an alternative service called gem.coop. On October 17, ownership of the RubyGems and Bundler repositories was handed over to the Ruby core team, even though those projects had never been part of core Ruby previously. The takeover and subsequent events have raised a number of questions in the Ruby community. Ruby Central is a nonprofit that was formed by David Alan Black and Chad Fowler in 2001 to organize events for the Ruby community. It soon began supporting other initiatives, such as RubyForge, which shut down in 2014, and has helped pay for RubyGems.org hosting since its inception. However, Ruby Central has always been primarily an organization to put on conferences—it has not been actively involved in maintenance or operations until its merger with Ruby Together. The work to maintain and operate RubyGems.org, the Ruby community's hosting service for Ruby gem packages, has been undertaken primarily by volunteers for most of its existence. LWN covered this in more detail in the article "A brief history of RubyGems.org". Takeover Development of RubyGems, Bundler, and software for RubyGems.org has been maintained in repositories under the RubyGems GitHub organization for many years. Organizations are used to manage shar...