Ruby, not so central
26 September, 2025
For those not into the inside baseball of Ruby: Ruby Central, who used to support the core Ruby technologies Bundler & Rubygems with hosting & some other things that cost money, lost the sponsorship of Sidekiq by platforming David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). DHH, Ruby on Rails' developer & patent owner is a big wheel in the Ruby world, but also the kind of person who might lose sponsorship for people who platform him. Feel free to look it up, there's plenty. So Ruby Central needed money, & they turned to another big player in the Ruby world, Shopify. Shopify have always been, at best, agnostic about the kind of beliefs DHH espouses that lose people sponsorship. Shopify, who've had DHH as a board member since the end of 2024. Shopify said sure. They'd stump up the cash, but made it a condition of receiving all their lovely money that Ruby Central wouldn't just support those key technologies, they would control them. So, the piper paid, that's what happened. Ruby Central removed all the maintainers they didn't employ, & took control of Bundler & Rubygems. Supply chain attack by sponsorship deal.
I've left Ruby in half-arsed ways before. Several times. I've been leaving Ruby bit by bit for years. You'd think I'd be good at it by now. But I always kept using it here or there because it was always comfortable enough for me to do that. I could afford to look the other way, & so I did. I guess I've found the point where I can't do that any more.
There were two days worth of build, backup, & other maintenance Ruby scripts that I'd built up (while leaving Ruby!) to rewrite in Python. That was the easy part.
Homebrew, the most widely used package manager for the Mac is Ruby. Homebrew formulae are Ruby classes. I'd only just written a bunch of Ruby to generate a Homebrew formula to distribute Zine. I could write Python to generate it, but that'd be just one more caveat, one more excuse. So Homebrew's gone. I use Macports, & some manual installs for myself, & distribute Zine as a notarised pkg now. No more Homebrew. Because no more Ruby.