On RubyGems & Governance
I’ve been thinking a lot about the last decade, RubyGems, and project governance.
RubyGems was always ran in a very informal way, with no real hierarchy.
But the people working on it need to put food on the table, so it needs to fit in the economy without being taken advantage of.
This is the role I expected Ruby Central to play:
The boundary between the realities of the economy and the ideals of open source.
We fell for a common myth in the programming world: that the formal organization and the informal project worked alongside each other as equals.
However, formal organizations are perceived as more legitimate and that gives them an unstated but real ability to coerce the informal projects they are intended to support.
By trying to stay out of the formal hierarchy, we accidentally got placed at the bottom of it.
Regardless of intentions, this had very real consequences: when backed into a corner, our only option was to walk away and rebuild.
Just like a decade ago, it all comes back to:
A system that assumes everyone is on equal footing, when placed in an environment where that is untrue, becomes a repeater for the inequalities that surround it.
Many programmers have no interest in formal governance processes, but letting people act and speak on our behalf without our input is what got us here.
The path forward is for the community to speak up and take direct ownership of what we make.