I got a similar feeling. The article’s title and closing paragraph reference not taking a side, but sandwiched between those are a lot of words that to me clearly indicate a “side” taken by the author.
Through all this I will say that Ruby Central hired a non-technical director whose responsibilities I would expect to include communication and operational expertise to not let these situations happen or at least contain the volatility. That was a failure by Ruby Central regardless of the actions of engineers.
Yeah, you can total up all the things he's said about Andre Arko, and even just accepting all of his spin and framing, I don't understand how it adds up to Shopify's actions being legitimate.
And I was part of the Ruby community for the period being addressed in the blog post, and I interacted with him back then, and he was certainly at a minimum difficult to deal with. None of it seems to be relevant at all to what just happened. Whatever Andre did or didn't do with Ruby Together funds, that organization no longer exists.
Also, in not into the faux shock at him paying himself $200-$250/hr as his rate for RT. He's presumably paying his own health care and living in SF so that actually seems pretty reasonable. If he was employed at a tech company earning that much, nobody would bat an eyelash.
> Also, in not into the faux shock at him paying himself $200-$250/hr as his rate for RT.
The article has been updated and the correct figure appears to have been $150/hr. That seems very cheap for a contracting rate -- another comment[1] went through RT's public disclosures and it seems that he was getting paid ~$30k/yr on average (with a maximum of $60k for one year) which paints a completely different picture to TFA.
He's explaining why he's not taking André Arko's side, which one can infer he's been asked to do.
No one is expecting him to speak out in favour of Ruby Central's side, and he several times mentions how poorly they've executed and communicated whatever they're trying to do. And the complaints about that are well-known to anyone reading this post, and don't need to be rehashed.
So no, I think he is indeed reserving judgment, but because of what he feels the need to emphasize given the narrative so far, it looks disproportionately critical of one side.
Well, let's say he's clearly not taking Arko's side but he's reserving judgment on whether Ruby Central did a reasonable thing or whether it's "a plague on both your houses".
I think what bumps me is the reserving judgment bit. Why? And until when? Is there an exception that some revelation from Ruby Central or Shopify is going to be released that will clarify all of this? We have actions that have happened and we can form opinions based on those right now.
Given Shopify's strong internal culture of "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" I feel comfortable holding them accountable to that same standard.
> Later, in August 2017, Andre accused Google Cloud Platform of wholesale copying gemstash's codebase, going so far as to threaten legal action in his opening message. He juxtaposed the accusation with the complaint that Google had, "repeatedly declined to support Ruby Together." The incident appeared to fit a pattern of behavior to pair high-conflict messaging with an admonition of the target's failure to fund the organization that paid him. Ultimately, Andre's claim turned out to be factually baseless—Google hadn't copied gemstash's code, after all.
The history strongly suggests a pattern behind current events.
It's exposing events that have been somewhat of an semi-open secret among Ruby maintainers for a very long time.
The link with the current events is that so far, neither Ruby Central nor Shopify have responded to Joel Drapper accusations, so the vast majority of people only have one side of the story.
Justin is just explaining why, based on what he knows of one of the main protagonists's character, he'd rather reserve judgment. Which also happens to be my stance ever since this thing started.
For multiple years now, I've heard more than one people involved in Ruby Central telling me they were very worried of the Ruby Central relationship with André.
Whether they had reasons to be worried or whether they were blowing it out of proportion, I can't say for sure. All I can say is that there was massive trust issues.
Whether he actually did something that triggered the recent events, or whether RC or Shopify tried to act proactively I don't know either. But I can only suspect that RC and Shopify are not speaking out, or at least are slow at doing it, because of potential legal consequence.
NB: Until not long ago, I was employed by Shopify, if I still was today I wouldn't be writing this comment.
I can see how you're coming away from this article with that perception, but, this needs to be read in the context of everything said prior: its intent isn't to provide you a full narrative of the situation, just additional context.
This article is the missing piece explaining why:
1. Shopify, allegedly, "specifically demanded that at least one of the RubyGems maintainers, André Arko, be excluded from returning to the project."[0]
2. Rafael França, a member of Rails Core, publicly listed concerns[1] about "competitor tooling"/"admin trust" r.e. rv.
Both are components of Joel Drapper's post that gave me pause on my first read, as these statements aren't something said without basis. That basis being correct or not is another matter, but I wouldn't expect either Shopify or a member of Rails Core to have such concerns simply because they don't like someone.
Personally, I don't come away from this article with the sense the author dislikes André, just that there's perhaps more rationale coming from a camp that's largely not said much so far.
Looking into the crystal ball of future predictions, the battle lines we're going to see in the Ruby community will be based around the acceptance or rejection of some of the allegations here about Ruby Together's spending.
I recall Ruby Together advocating for personal sponsorships in addition to corporate. It's one thing to be treating Apple adapters as disposable HB pencils & buying dinners on the company card if companies are funding you, but it's a different matter of fiscal responsibility when you're potentially spending personal donations.
Coming out of this, I'll suspect everyone will align that open-source contributors should be paid, and companies should in some way support open-source, but we'll see fractures over if André's alleged behaviour is acceptable.
I'm looking forward to someone/something assembling an entity which is trustworthy & responsible. If Ruby Central can't be that entity, we'll need a replacement.
It isn't explaining why Shopify finds André to be a risk, its explaining why Justin Searls finds André to be a risk.
> but I wouldn't expect either Shopify or a member of Rails Core to have such concerns simply because they don't like someone.
Being given authority doesn't result in a person being given the ability to be reasonable. Of Rails, there is several years of controversy of how one notable member presents his concerns and who he targets with his concerns.
I think a total of half a paragraph is about current events in any form.