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FOSDEM PWA

What happened to RubyGems and what can we learn?

K.1.105 (La Fontaine) | Day 1 | 15:30 - 15:55 | Speakers: Mike McQuaid

What happened to RubyGems and what can we learn?
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Notes

Abstract

In September and October 2025, RubyGems and Bundler, the clients and package registry for the Ruby language, had most of their maintainers removed by RubyCentral, the non-profit foundation that claimed ownership of these repositories. Since then, some of these repositories have been moved into the Ruby organisation and some of the ex-RubyGems maintainers have created an alternative hosting service, gem.coop.

I was a neutral party involved with initial mediation between RubyCentral and the maintainers before and during this transition and helped gem.coop bootstrap a governance process.

These events have much for non-Ruby projects to learn about non-profits, governance, money and access in open-source and I will share my learnings without taking any particular side in the disputes.

Attachments

Speakers

Mike McQuaid

Mike McQuaid is the Project Leader of the Homebrew package manager for macOS (and Linux), maintainer for 16 years, contributor to a wide variety of FOSS and an ex-employee of GitHub.

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