Last Friday, Ellen Dash, a long-time RubyGems maintainer, posted a PDF titled 'Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems' explaining how the RubyGems GitHub organization was renamed, a new maintainer was added to the RubyGems project, and existing maintainers were removed, noting: "This was a hostile takeover."

Ruby Central then posted 'Strengthing the Stewardship of RubyGems and Bundler', a rather dry explanation saying that in order to "strengthen supply chain security" (perhaps triggered by recent issues in the npm ecosystem) they needed to strengthen "governance processes" and formalize/tighten access to production systems (as they maintain RubyGems.org). Ruby Central's Executive Director Shan Cureton also posted ▶️ a 9-minute video covering the same ground. Joel Drapper has written a Ruby Central Fact Check post tackling the claims made.

..STORY CONTINUES FROM ABOVE

Was this just a poorly executed attempt to run a tighter ship for the RubyGems system? There's more to it than that, as Joel Drapper deftly covers in this summary of the entire situation — explaining that access and rights that long-time RubyGems and Bundler maintainers should not have lost were unfairly taken away (since RubyGems.org and the RubyGems/Bundler projects are not the same thing).

Today, Andre Arko (of Bundler fame) posted his take saying that 'Bundler belongs to the Ruby community', giving a lot of (interesting!) history to the development of Bundler, how Ruby Together and Ruby Central merged, and why Ruby Central isn't able to assert it owns Bundler itself. The story has yet to reach a conclusion, and we'll let you know when it does.

TLDR: Read Joel Drapper's summary, as well as that of former Ruby Central member Josef Šimánek.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

• 🇺🇸 Jim Remsik is organizing a series of 'travelling' Ruby events called XO Ruby. The next three, all taking place in October, are in Portland, San Diego and Austin.

• Matheus Richard proposes the idea of a Array#values method in line with what Hash offers.

• Mike McQuaid does some analysis of who's recently contributed code to the RubyGems project.

• A group has published an open letter to the Rails core team to fork Rails and 'cut ties with DHH' for various reasons cited in the letter.

• The IEEE has released a list of the top programming languages in 2025 and Ruby comes in at number seventeen.

📄 Creating a Rails Console-like Environment for a Plain Ruby Project – Certainly something I've had to do a few times! Daniela Baron

📄 Flaky Tests, Be Gone: Long-Lasting Relief for Chronic CI Retry Irritation – An attempt to cover ‘every known cause of test flakiness’ when tests run locally but not in CI. There’s a lot here. Artur Petrov

📄 Adding User Auth with the Rails 8 Auth Generator in API-Only Apps Exequiel Rozas