- uv is a cool tool, but Astral has signaled their intention to have it tie in nicely to paid services.
- that's a nice moat!
- Andre & friends saw that in the Python community (and uv's success) and decided they could do the same for Ruby
- Their collective announces rv and now wants to make us dependent on them & friends for Ruby Gems.
- After Hashicorp and others, I'm extremely wary of orgs luring me in with free shit. Hashicorp is maybe the lightest example of this but they're very intentional about enterprise-walling business-essential features.
- I don't want the Ruby ecosystem dependent on one party or even a tiny collective of people. This is just as bad to me as the Ruby Central situation right now.
The Ruby ecosystem is already decentralised in that there is no single source of truth for published gems. You can pull the source from any software forge that uses git, you can point to any self hosted gem server or use something like Artifactory or GitHub package registry. You can vendor the code if you want.
This entire post is practically the case in point, except I’m not clear on how they got real time sync with RubyGems and if any other competitor would have the same capability.
To use Astral and uv as an example, they would have to fork PyPI and maintain all the infra for that and not just the tool that manages the dependencies.
By "Astral" do you mean "Spinel"? Also, what paid services? So far the only paid services they've mentioned is retainer services that essentially amount to priority customer support. The tools themselves are only ever described as free
EDIT: Misread the comment and thought it was only about `rv`, not both `uv` and `rv`
What is Spinel? Astral is the developer of uv, and they have announced their hosted platform service, pyx [0]. It appears it will be FOSS as well, but they'll have a hosted version of it.
> When Ruby Together first launched in 2015, the website suggested donations went to pay "our team" (...) This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.
This a fact. By this alone I don't think Andre Arko is an honest person.
Back in the day, nobody ever had said to me that they believed I was earning money from Ruby Together. This whole thing was speculation at best. And regardless, once it was suggested that this may be a possibility, it was immediately changed to be unambiguous.
André is absolutely a standup individual.
I have tried to stay in good terms with the other people involved in this (except DHH), but this claim was always ridiculous.
This absolutely happened and is not speculation. I can't find the emails from the individuals that emailed me, but I did find my email to the board of directors asking that the website language be changed because people had pinged me thinking I would be getting money, or that the money would go to fund rubygems.org.
At the time I'd sent the email I was unaware Ruby Together was on HN front page (and that's why people were pinging me)
I think you may have misread it. The original claim is:
> This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.
Steve said "that didn't happen to me" and then Aaron said "that definitely did happen to me". Seems pretty relevant. I don't think he was claiming steve was wrong in not having heard that, but Aaron was saying it did happen to him, so the claim is true.
(and in terms of evidence, do you want him to share the emails he got? A first hand account seems enough evidence to me)
Seems pretty unambiguous, and a good reason to chime in.
I was misremembering it. Now that I've checked, it's clear that the claim was that the money was for paying "the team" [1], which consisted of André Arko and David Radcliffe [2]
Altogether, it demonstrates how Andre misled his audience on who was getting the money. IMO, I see a distinct pattern of him crossing boundaries and then covering it up using his social skills & friend group.
TBH the whole thing is pretty opaque. There are a lot of accusations floating around. It's pretty easily to capitalize on "Big evil shopify is making a takeover", but I suspect there's a lot more happening behind the scenes.
> In this case I have first hand knowledge since he pitched me on the idea: would Sidekiq, being a big sponsor of Ruby Central in the past, be interested if rubygems could somehow use the remote IP to identify the companies downloading the sidekiq gem so I could use that to upsell those companies
