Context: Justin Searls is a “high profile” person in the Ruby and Rails community. He has a reputation for being a nice person and behaving in good faith.
From a personal standpoint, I can easily take his words at face value. I’m also curious about the views of Aaron “tenderlove” Patterson, who has a similar reputation.
Now that Justin has spoken out, maybe Aaron will take the opportunity to. Both tend to stay out of drama.
Some additional context is that Justin Searls is close friends with people who are or have been on Rails Core and/or at Shopify. I've long been a fan of Justin's work, and I've spent time with him at conferences so I can attest to him being a nice person in my experience… But, given the alleged parties at play here, it's hard to take this piece as unbiased when it lacks that disclosure
It's an opinion piece by a trusted member of the community. He doesn't need to act unbiased but be credible and informative. As he wrote in his disclosure:
> People whose livelihood depends on the health of the Ruby ecosystem deserve more information than they're getting, especially now that its operational stability has come under threat.
On this count, Searls' article has done the work. I didn't know that Andre Arko baselessly threatened Google with lawyers, or that Andre played fast-and-loose with people's donations. That information was excluded from "unbiased" analyses and fact-checks which seem to largely target Andre's enemies.
The problem is not that Searls has opinions, it's that this petty hit piece against Andre was heavily wrapped in neutral, 'all I can do is offer a little bit of context', 'I'm not rushing to take sides' framing language, resulting in a disingenuous, passive-aggressive tone.
Why is Justin dredging up that one time eight years ago when Andre mistakenly called out a repo for infringing upon his employer's work (for which he publicly apologized five hours later)? Why is he harping on anecdotes from nine years ago in order to suggest Andre may have allegedly (gasp) expensed technology purchases and business meals to his employer? What does this all have to do with the current situation, other than unnecessarily stir the pot with a laundry list of old petty grievances fed to him by a bunch of anonymous contacts ('a lot of different people told me a lot of concerning stories')?
I think the author's close ties to Rails Core / Shopify employees is extremely important context for this post, especially since it's context that's been intentionally hidden by a neutral, unbiased framing.
In open source software, it is what is whispered behind closed doors that often matters most. The whispers in this dispute concern André. His behaviour, many quietly say, is the principal cause of the dispute with RubyCentral. His practical contributions over the past year have been scant, yet other maintainers suggest that if he were removed from the GitHub organisation’s ownership, they would simply reappoint him.
Few dare state as much in public, hence the anonymity. The reason is straightforward: André has previously threatened legal action, and appears to be pursuing it once again. RubyCentral, for its part, has bungled the handling of the matter. But André has managed — with the exception of this one post — to cast himself not as a long-time beneficiary of his open source work, drawing maximum financial gain from it, but rather as an aggrieved victim of institutional mismanagement.
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.
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.
From the outside, I'd argue that the most neutral way to interpret all of this is to assume good faith and trust every statement that hasn't been explicitly disagreed with by another party. Between what I've read before this blog post and what the author says here, that would lead me to conclude that Andre had years of behaving unprofessionally to Ruby Central and at least on one occasion towards Shopify itself, and then recently when Shopify became the de facto only funding source of Ruby Central, they demanded that Ruby Central take over RubyGems and Bundler, and as part of that, Andre got removed. The lack of communication around it just makes it seem like they had every motivation to try to remove him specifically, and took quite drastic actions to do so, but for unstated reasons chose not to publicize this aspect of it. If this were actually what the stated intentions of the changes were, I might understand it, even if I felt that using financial pressure on a third-party organization to remove someone from a different organization was a bit heavy-handed. Without that, it's hard to feel like this new context changes things much; even if he deserved the outcome personally, making huge changes to infrastructure that a huge community relies on to remove him seems like something worthwhile to be transparent about, and it doesn't do much to raise the level of trust that their stewardship of the infrastructure will be handled responsibly.
My opinion on this might change if the timeline of what happened were challenged in some meaningful way, but allusions to "details that would contradict fact-checks and timelines others have pieced together and published" isn't that. The only way to steel-man an argument that isn't stated is to assume infallibility, and that's just not reasonable to ask people to do.
This is tangential to the main point of the article, but the anecdote about the dongle is interesting to me. The author's point seems to be that it was disturbing that Andre joked that being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) was no big deal. It seems to me there are three potential aspects to this:
1. Being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals)
2. Joking about how that is no big deal
3. Not being transparent about whether your nonprofit blithely funds stuff like a new dongle (and/or meals)
From my perspective #3 is definitely an issue, and I can see how #2 could be annoying, but #1 is not really an issue at all, and it's not clear to me whether it's an issue for the author of this article.
It's not much of a stretch from "programmers working on open source tools deserve to earn an income that's commensurate with what salaried engineers earn at the companies who benefit from those tools" to "programmers working on open source tools deserve a level of overall employment benefits commensurate with etc.". For-profit companies routinely pay for dongles like it ain't no thang, toss money around left and right on meals (even with questionable justification), and so on and so forth. And in fact the people who benefit from this reimbursement do joke about how it's "free" to them, etc. In this context, being reimbursed for dongles and meals seems only another form of leveling the playing field.
Now of course, if people think they're donating only to pay a salary, and it turns out they're paying for meals, that's a problem (#3 in my list above). But if a person is up-front about saying "you're paying to equalize the overall compensation situation between the people who write open-source software and the people who use it", I don't think anyone should be surprised that that person expects to be reimbursed for dongles and meals. I'm not sure whether that was the case here, but, well, it's just something that stood out to me in the article.
i don't think #3 should be an issue either. buying a new dongle is a business expense. which means it should be paid from an account that is not taxed for those expenses, which i think is easier if you don't pay it from your salary. that's what i do with my company too. the extend that he benefits from that is effectively an increase in compensation, and so the only remaining question is, is the compensation fair or not.
Seems like a few old scores are being settled during this drama. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people on the side of RubyGems are avoiding commenting in case any legal disputes play out.
I feel like very little of that post actually addresses what occurred.
Granted that happens when folks take a form of "don't want to get into it". Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the whole blog entry means anything then.
In addition to what others said about TFA, This part jumped out to me:
> Specifically, I was sent this commit replacing references to Homebrew from late July. As evidence of Homebrew's authorship was being erased and obscured, no additional acknowledgement was added to credit Homebrew for having created and maintained Portable Ruby since 2016.
A paragraph later the author writes
> In fairness to Andre, the rv-ruby repo continues to retain a copy of Homebrew's LICENSE.txt which names "Homebrew contributors" as the copyright holder. Andre also later added an explicit acknowledgement to the README, but that attribution came more than a month later, and (I'm told) only after he was directly asked to credit the original project.
"In fairness" my ass. How can the author leverage a claim of authorship being erased, when the license is sitting there, untouched, for over a year?
And when someone told Andre to credit the original project... He simply did? Seemingly without any issues. In what universe is this an example of "obscuring authorship"?
Of course, putting this section right after the section where Andre mistakingly accused google of copying code without perserving the original license, leads you to think Andre is a hypocrite, when in fact there were over 7 years between the two "events". The storytelling is doubly dishonest because as Andre kept the original license intact, rendering all implicit claims of hypocrisy void.
> In August 2025, and seemingly out of nowhere, someone pointed me to the project spinel-coop/rv-ruby, an apparent fork of homebrew/homebrew-portable-ruby. I say "apparent", because rather than using GitHub's fork button—which would have maintained clear attribution of who created the upstream project—it looks like it was instead cloned and re-pushed by Andre.
GitHub has long had problems with forked repos being half broken compared to the original repo. Used to be that you couldn't search within forked repos, at the very least.
I'd actually consider it best practice to push to a new repo if you were entirely taking over a project and weren't going to be pushing upstream.
I haven't extensively researched if GH has managed to eliminate all the reduced features of forks, but after something like 15 years of using it (proabably about the same amount of time Andre has), I would reflexively establish a fresh main repo if I was setting up a project and I wouldn't fork.
This isn't really evidence of anything other than the author of the blog post looking to spin a narrative.
I'm sorry but the article seems pretty biased, and doesn't really give any argument for why what happened would be in any way justified. Author keeps adding their own interpretation to Github comments and events, which — just by looking at the contents — are needlessly negative. For example [1] where commit message states
> We've been continuing to backport bugfixs to the 1.7.x series just for Heroku, but unless Heroku joins Ruby Together I don't have enough time available to make sure that continues to happen.
but OP claims it
> was interpreted as leveraging his control over Bundler as a pay-to-play scheme
I'm sorry but not supporting outdated versions of an open-source tool for a business is perfectly reasonable.
Similarly, [2] was again is described as "was interpreted at the time as indicating the feature would be withheld from Bundler because Heroku had failed to pay Ruby Together.". This is not at all how I read it — the comment just says that the open source project has priorities and not all of them can be implemented given the level of funding it has.
These are just two examples, but the article is riddled with wording like "blatant copying", "brazenly hypocritical", "was interpreted as [a bad thing]" etc.
I just feel like reading a clearly lopsided political piece intended to incite negative emotions towards something/someone. There are just enough facts to make it sound fact-based, but enough of author's own feelings and interpretation that I'm not at all convinced.
In fact, towards the end the author even states that there's been ~6 years where nothing of note happened, before the current drama. That seems like a relatively healthy situation?
I felt the exact same as you while reading the article.
I started reading with an open mind, got a bit confused by the "dongle" joke, which the author doesn't remember but somehow it should be inappropriate. It's equivalent to saying "I think he said something bad 10 years ago but I'm bit really sure"
Then there's the part about "leverage control" to extort heroku, which was a blatant misrepresentation of events and shows a clear Agenda.
Not taking sides my ass. I can only conclude the author's reputation, as being ine of the nicest persons in the community, was earned through similar manipulation.
And since the entire article is a "take my word" type of story, the blatant bias already displayed casta a shadow of doubt over the veracity of any other claims it makes, leading me to conclude the opposite: André is actually a nice and likable person, and has good principles.
I wonder if there's a term for this kind of thing where people use the word "including".
As an example, I might have a non-profit that serves soup at soup kitchens and also pays me to manage it. If someone gives $100k, suppose I pay myself $90k and use $10k to serve soup.
When someone threatens to cut the contribution, I say "This will affect the non-profit's mission since the $100k a year goes to critical things like all the soup served at kitchens".
The impression is to imply that the majority of it goes to the soup. But the majority doesn't, in fact, go to the soup.
It would be useful to have a concise term for this particular kind of deceitfulness.
> In the organization’s 2010-2011 financial report it was revealed that Susan G. Komen only devotes 20.9 percent of the donations it receives to researching breast cancer.
I've been seeing the term "hostage puppies" being used for this for a while now; apparently it is associated with esr, though he himself disclaims credit (https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1891528290676199513).
It may not be a perfect fit since per the tweet, the term does not entail that there is necessarily any deceit or confusion involved - under the hostage model, the soup kitchen may be quite open about pocketing 90% of the money, as long as the implication stands that there will be nobody to distribute the remaining 10% in soup if not for them.
As for the deception/confusion aspect of it, I am not aware of a perfectly-fitting term, but Scott Alexander has been blindly groping other parts of that particular elephant for a while, e.g. in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen... and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-mea.... There is a common thread in that you can effectively mess with people's reasoning by manipulating their category boundaries, and this is not something that we have worked out good defenses against. Is software piracy theft? Is a fund of which 10% go towards charitable causes being used for charity? Is a TV popsci presenter with a BA a scientist?, and so on.
Why do you lay fault with the sponsor pulling funding, and not with the people who opted to have someone so controversial as a speaker, causing the sponsor to pull funding?
Because we all have to get along regardless of what you believe and DHH hasn't advocated for violence against anyone. You can't unperson everyone disagreeable, especially relative to their contributions in the Rails community.
Notice I said Rails community, not Ruby community. Not letting DHH speak at RailsConf is like barring the Pope from the Vatican. There are a lot of big new changes in Rails this year that he has been championing. He was absolutely the right person to give the keynote.
Edit: I did a little googling and it sounds like he banned political speech at work? Is that the extent of it? His Wikipedia article doesn't say anything about controversy or racism.
Please read his post on his blog to take your own conclusions, but as I and many other read it his post, basically non white people are incompatible with British culture and immigrants are solely a problem and serve only purpose to foster rape gangs and drug dealers.
The most recent thing was saying there has been too much immigration to London, so various leftists are calling him a Nazi, fascist, white supremacist, etc.
Be that as it may, they effectively entirely handed governance of Ruby Central over to a single party and manufactured a funding crisis that that party used to make drastic change.
This directly damaged the entire Ruby community. Their dollars had influence that they could have used to steer the organization elsewhere, but instead they took their toys away and gave control to the very people they disagreed with.
There wasn't a single failure point until Sidekiq pulled their funding, that's why Ruby Central's reaction to impending failure, as you said, was so extreme.
So not a single point of failure but the single action of Sidekiq's pulling funding was the cause... almost as if Sidekiq's funding was the single point of failure.
If this is the reaction of the Ruby Community then no wonder they got themselves into this mess to begin with. Like deciding the intern should be fired for dropping prod and not the CTO who told everyone to use admin permissions for everything.
Where is this quote from? The person you're replying to didn't say that at all.
They merely highlighted the fact that Perham attempted to punish RubyCentral for their "platforming" of DHH by pulling funding, but instead managed to consolidate power in the hands of those loyal to DHH. Had a bit of a Game of Thrones appeal which is I think why it has had such staying power on HN over the last week.
First OpenAI, then WordPress and now this. I think we are learning there is a point where VCs using open source become allergic to it. My only suggested solution at this point is to be honest about it. Because only then can solutions emerge.
>The friend explained that Andre believed programmers working on open source tools deserve to earn an income that's commensurate with what salaried engineers earn at the companies who benefit from those tools.
The AUDACITY!
Expecting to get paid for your work.
Every large FOSS ecosystem is going to run into this.
The only exceptions being those with a corporate primary donor , like .net core.
You left out the rest of the paragraph (emphasis mine):
> I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it. I also recall a figure like either $200 or $250 per hour being mentioned as the rate he was effectively paying himself. Whatever the rate actually was, I distinctly remember thinking, "holy shit, that's a lot higher than individual donors would probably assume."
I agree that maintainers of popular open-source projects deserve to be paid enough for a decent standard of living, but $200/hr (* 40hr/wk * 50wk/yr = $400k/yr) is excessive.
$200 /hr is a pretty low consulting rate. You are never going to be 100% utilized, so right off the bat you can divide that $400k by at least 50% over a long period of time. You also have to pay for your own insurance, equipment...
$200 /hr would be what I would consider to be the going rate for any mid level, non-FAANG type developer and pretty fair imho!
Another part of the article mentions him "wasting" money
> Andre needed an adapter, so I ran up to lend him mine. As he was giving it back, I recall him making a half-joking, flippant remark about either his dongle or his computer, saying that "Ruby Together will just buy me another one." It really rubbed me the wrong way. Over the years to follow, more than one person told me stories of Andre paying for shared meals on behalf of Ruby Together without an apparent legitimate justification.
The article also accuses him of misrepresenting if not lying where certain donations went when soliciting more. Presumably, if he had justified reasons to need more funds, he could've said them.
Granted, we don't know how much Andre was making and what his expenses were, and the article seems to have its own biases. But I think at least the general outline of Andre's (and his organization's) funds/expenses should be public and accurate, so potential donors can decide whether he really needs their funds or another project needs them more.
It's a legal requirement for most US non-profits to file public and accurate accounting of their funds and expenses, Ruby Together is no exception and all the info is publicly available [1].
Having previously worked as a software engineer at an ed-tech non-profit, I found nothing nefarious or unusual in Andre receiving compensation for his work or in the anecdotes around expensing business-related technology purchases or meals to his employer, this is all standard industry practice.
And in the USA, if you volunteer professional labor, you cannot take it off on your taxes.
So yeah, if I can't get the benefit of taking off of my taxes, I do want paid. Can't afford it otherwise, since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer.
Rich people can donate money, and they take large tax writeoffs for it.
The rest of us have our labor. No matter how professional we are and donate, we cannot get tax writeoffs for donation of our labor.
I am pointing out the hypocrisy of our econo-social class's primary possession, and how the richies get tax writeoffs, and the labor class gets shit on.
You can sell that labor “you cannot afford” to donate to someone else - and donate the money you receive for it. So you get a tax write off instead of getting shat on or whatever.
No, that's not how it works in the USA - apparently this person wants a tax deduction for their voluntary contribution as if it was a financial contribution to a non-profit which is tax deductible.
I'm making a larger comparison that most of our resource, which is labor, cannot be donated at the mean cost per hour and taken off of taxes.
However rich people, whose primary resource is money, CAN be taken off on taxes.
Rich people have ways they can donate and shed their tax burden. Whereas average working people cannot volunteer professional labor and take off the same equivalent.
That's not how you compute yearly earnings from a consulting rate. We consultants need to negotiate contracts, do marketing, accounting, etc. We get sick, we go on vacation and sometimes you're just hustling for clients. Also, that day that you're completely unmotivated, or moody, or hangover, or it was election day and the news are crazy, and you don't write a line of code in the whole day? You still get paid when on a salary, but you don't bill that to a client. 200 * 32 * 42 gives you a much better estimate for a highly productive individual.
For such a critical piece of software/infrastructure that runs in massive companies making hundreds of millions, this is a rounding error. I literally do not see a single issue with that rate, even in 2000s.
Now the arguments for frivolous spending is definitely an issue that should be criticized, but getting paid to support a massive language ecosystem and SaaS at-large, that’s a non issue at any rate
For an open source org that’s running on donations and falsely implying that their donations are going to maintain server costs, yes that’s excessive. If the donations where clearly communicating that they where directly for this persons personal salary then no.
I define a “great” standard of living as roughly: nutritious food (basic meat, vegetables, spices); a home apartment in an area without excessive crime, noise, or pollution; medical care; a couple weeks of vacation per year; ability to frequently purchase cheap things like video games, movie tickets, takeout; ability to rarely purchase more expensive things like high-end technology, quality furniture, very fancy meals; some choice of more frequent vacations, a better apartment/location, fancier everyday food, more things; and everything we take for granted (water, electricity, clean clothes, etc.).
Listing it out it’s actually quite a lot. But is it $400k? I really doubt it (very likely even $100k is more than enough, though inflation will change that). If you or a family member has health issues you may need this much, but that’s the exception (and a failure of health insurance and altruism…)
"Excessive" is obviously a subjective measurement. At times I don't think that HN's median audience appreciates that a 400k/yr salary is objectively extremely high, even for software engineers, even in 2025. A "mere" $367K/yr total compensation puts you in the 90th percentile of SWE earnings. I know Google, Facebook, and a few others greatly exceed that in total compensation at their higher SWE levels, but they're probably not the baseline you should be looking at across the industry.
I would personally say that $400K/yr for being an open source developer is fantastic, although I appreciate that that's also subjective. Even in Silicon Valley, though, $400K/yr would net you about $18K/month, which would be enough to live quite comfortably while still socking away more than half of your income for retirement.
it's really important to not compare freelance and W2 salaries directly. freelance gets 10% off the top immediately for social security and Medicare taxes that employers usually pay. next is your health insurance which will eat another couple thousand a year. then you have to remember that as freelance you don't get paid for vacation and sick time, so there goes another ~10%. also, you're not getting paid for all the hours. if you spend a day without work to do as a freelance, you don't get payed for it. $200 an hour is still a good salary, but it's not $400k a year. it's probably closer to $250k
> As such, Andre's goal with Ruby Together was characterized as an effort to fund development activities—initially his own, but eventually others—by paying themselves a market hourly rate. I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it.
Programmers need to grow up and dispense with this belief.
They’d like to imagine a world where there’s no such thing as sales and marketing, where they can interact with humans and especially business manager types who tell them what to build as little as possible.
So many developers seem to genuinely not understand why their contributions to software used by millions don’t magically generate income.
If you’re a FOSS developer you need to grow up and do one of the following rather than moaning about not being paid:
1. Accept that you’re not getting paid and do the work as an exercise in personal growth and enjoyment. Don’t make it your job and don’t do burnout-inducing things like providing support for free.
2. Come up with a business model. Learn something about sales and marketing. E.g., nginx plus.
3. Get a corporate sponsor and deal with having a manager type telling you what to do and/or corporate employees steering the direction of your project.
I don't agree. You can have a good life from Open source.
The problem is that people assumes the money that keeps rails and whatever going is guaranteed and that no one should contribute too because it is free.
Sidekiq has all the right to remove the support for someone they find troublesome and can harm their image.
Now if another company is able to take full control is because there were never anyone else doing that.
It seems pure luck that Sidekiq never pushed their own coup themselves, probably they are just good guys.
But if you take my cookies, add sprinkles then resell them, I can expect a modest donation to keep the bakery running.
Otherwise I'm going to run out of flour and no one gets cookies.
This is the original sin of FOSS. Large mega corps end up taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth while only contributing when they feel like it.
At least with . net core Microsoft ultimately pays the bills. No one knows how other independent FOSS projects are supposed to be funded.
Context: Justin Searls is a “high profile” person in the Ruby and Rails community. He has a reputation for being a nice person and behaving in good faith.
From a personal standpoint, I can easily take his words at face value. I’m also curious about the views of Aaron “tenderlove” Patterson, who has a similar reputation.
Now that Justin has spoken out, maybe Aaron will take the opportunity to. Both tend to stay out of drama.
Some additional context is that Justin Searls is close friends with people who are or have been on Rails Core and/or at Shopify. I've long been a fan of Justin's work, and I've spent time with him at conferences so I can attest to him being a nice person in my experience… But, given the alleged parties at play here, it's hard to take this piece as unbiased when it lacks that disclosure
It's an opinion piece by a trusted member of the community. He doesn't need to act unbiased but be credible and informative. As he wrote in his disclosure:
> People whose livelihood depends on the health of the Ruby ecosystem deserve more information than they're getting, especially now that its operational stability has come under threat.
On this count, Searls' article has done the work. I didn't know that Andre Arko baselessly threatened Google with lawyers, or that Andre played fast-and-loose with people's donations. That information was excluded from "unbiased" analyses and fact-checks which seem to largely target Andre's enemies.
The problem is not that Searls has opinions, it's that this petty hit piece against Andre was heavily wrapped in neutral, 'all I can do is offer a little bit of context', 'I'm not rushing to take sides' framing language, resulting in a disingenuous, passive-aggressive tone.
Why is Justin dredging up that one time eight years ago when Andre mistakenly called out a repo for infringing upon his employer's work (for which he publicly apologized five hours later)? Why is he harping on anecdotes from nine years ago in order to suggest Andre may have allegedly (gasp) expensed technology purchases and business meals to his employer? What does this all have to do with the current situation, other than unnecessarily stir the pot with a laundry list of old petty grievances fed to him by a bunch of anonymous contacts ('a lot of different people told me a lot of concerning stories')?
I think the author's close ties to Rails Core / Shopify employees is extremely important context for this post, especially since it's context that's been intentionally hidden by a neutral, unbiased framing.
To be consistent, your comment should disclose that you wrote a negative article about DHH and Shopify.
Aaron is employed by Shopify. Also I *think* he was part of the shopify team that took over some responsibilities and/or on-call, see here for the sudden commits after a very long break: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/commits/master/?author=...
In open source software, it is what is whispered behind closed doors that often matters most. The whispers in this dispute concern André. His behaviour, many quietly say, is the principal cause of the dispute with RubyCentral. His practical contributions over the past year have been scant, yet other maintainers suggest that if he were removed from the GitHub organisation’s ownership, they would simply reappoint him.
Few dare state as much in public, hence the anonymity. The reason is straightforward: André has previously threatened legal action, and appears to be pursuing it once again. RubyCentral, for its part, has bungled the handling of the matter. But André has managed — with the exception of this one post — to cast himself not as a long-time beneficiary of his open source work, drawing maximum financial gain from it, but rather as an aggrieved victim of institutional mismanagement.
Aaron did RT the post here which likely indicates some agreement with the sentiment in it: https://x.com/searls/status/1972293469193351558
Also he shared it directly while saying it was good here: https://x.com/tenderlove/status/1972370330892321197
Aaron has shared this same article, on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/tenderlove.dev/post/3lzw5byy7xc24
This seems to be mostly "I dislike Andre" and not really about the current events?
I think a total of half a paragraph is about current events in any form.
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.
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.
Huh. I just don’t read that post and think, this is an unbiased take by someone reserving judgment.
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.
If you read more closely, the article notes potential malfeasance and cites receipts https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-gemserve...
> 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.
And he completely apologized when it turned out he was wrong and made a hasty judgement, 5 hours later.
And a single instance of something is hardly a pattern.
I think it's trying to say "here are shady things Andre did that might have led to the current events".
While I agree, I think that was where Justin’s experience could contribute some nuance to the overall narrative.
> not really about the 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.
[0]: https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/#:~:text=Shopify...
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/rmfranca.bsky.social/post/3lz7alpob...
From the outside, I'd argue that the most neutral way to interpret all of this is to assume good faith and trust every statement that hasn't been explicitly disagreed with by another party. Between what I've read before this blog post and what the author says here, that would lead me to conclude that Andre had years of behaving unprofessionally to Ruby Central and at least on one occasion towards Shopify itself, and then recently when Shopify became the de facto only funding source of Ruby Central, they demanded that Ruby Central take over RubyGems and Bundler, and as part of that, Andre got removed. The lack of communication around it just makes it seem like they had every motivation to try to remove him specifically, and took quite drastic actions to do so, but for unstated reasons chose not to publicize this aspect of it. If this were actually what the stated intentions of the changes were, I might understand it, even if I felt that using financial pressure on a third-party organization to remove someone from a different organization was a bit heavy-handed. Without that, it's hard to feel like this new context changes things much; even if he deserved the outcome personally, making huge changes to infrastructure that a huge community relies on to remove him seems like something worthwhile to be transparent about, and it doesn't do much to raise the level of trust that their stewardship of the infrastructure will be handled responsibly.
My opinion on this might change if the timeline of what happened were challenged in some meaningful way, but allusions to "details that would contradict fact-checks and timelines others have pieced together and published" isn't that. The only way to steel-man an argument that isn't stated is to assume infallibility, and that's just not reasonable to ask people to do.
This is tangential to the main point of the article, but the anecdote about the dongle is interesting to me. The author's point seems to be that it was disturbing that Andre joked that being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) was no big deal. It seems to me there are three potential aspects to this:
1. Being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) 2. Joking about how that is no big deal 3. Not being transparent about whether your nonprofit blithely funds stuff like a new dongle (and/or meals)
From my perspective #3 is definitely an issue, and I can see how #2 could be annoying, but #1 is not really an issue at all, and it's not clear to me whether it's an issue for the author of this article.
It's not much of a stretch from "programmers working on open source tools deserve to earn an income that's commensurate with what salaried engineers earn at the companies who benefit from those tools" to "programmers working on open source tools deserve a level of overall employment benefits commensurate with etc.". For-profit companies routinely pay for dongles like it ain't no thang, toss money around left and right on meals (even with questionable justification), and so on and so forth. And in fact the people who benefit from this reimbursement do joke about how it's "free" to them, etc. In this context, being reimbursed for dongles and meals seems only another form of leveling the playing field.
Now of course, if people think they're donating only to pay a salary, and it turns out they're paying for meals, that's a problem (#3 in my list above). But if a person is up-front about saying "you're paying to equalize the overall compensation situation between the people who write open-source software and the people who use it", I don't think anyone should be surprised that that person expects to be reimbursed for dongles and meals. I'm not sure whether that was the case here, but, well, it's just something that stood out to me in the article.
i don't think #3 should be an issue either. buying a new dongle is a business expense. which means it should be paid from an account that is not taxed for those expenses, which i think is easier if you don't pay it from your salary. that's what i do with my company too. the extend that he benefits from that is effectively an increase in compensation, and so the only remaining question is, is the compensation fair or not.
Seems like a few old scores are being settled during this drama. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people on the side of RubyGems are avoiding commenting in case any legal disputes play out.
I feel like very little of that post actually addresses what occurred.
Granted that happens when folks take a form of "don't want to get into it". Maybe I missed something, but I don't think the whole blog entry means anything then.
Such a blatantly biased and dishonest article.
In addition to what others said about TFA, This part jumped out to me:
> Specifically, I was sent this commit replacing references to Homebrew from late July. As evidence of Homebrew's authorship was being erased and obscured, no additional acknowledgement was added to credit Homebrew for having created and maintained Portable Ruby since 2016.
A paragraph later the author writes
> In fairness to Andre, the rv-ruby repo continues to retain a copy of Homebrew's LICENSE.txt which names "Homebrew contributors" as the copyright holder. Andre also later added an explicit acknowledgement to the README, but that attribution came more than a month later, and (I'm told) only after he was directly asked to credit the original project.
"In fairness" my ass. How can the author leverage a claim of authorship being erased, when the license is sitting there, untouched, for over a year?
And when someone told Andre to credit the original project... He simply did? Seemingly without any issues. In what universe is this an example of "obscuring authorship"?
Of course, putting this section right after the section where Andre mistakingly accused google of copying code without perserving the original license, leads you to think Andre is a hypocrite, when in fact there were over 7 years between the two "events". The storytelling is doubly dishonest because as Andre kept the original license intact, rendering all implicit claims of hypocrisy void.
In short, this article is borderline defamation.
Also:
> In August 2025, and seemingly out of nowhere, someone pointed me to the project spinel-coop/rv-ruby, an apparent fork of homebrew/homebrew-portable-ruby. I say "apparent", because rather than using GitHub's fork button—which would have maintained clear attribution of who created the upstream project—it looks like it was instead cloned and re-pushed by Andre.
GitHub has long had problems with forked repos being half broken compared to the original repo. Used to be that you couldn't search within forked repos, at the very least.
I'd actually consider it best practice to push to a new repo if you were entirely taking over a project and weren't going to be pushing upstream.
I haven't extensively researched if GH has managed to eliminate all the reduced features of forks, but after something like 15 years of using it (proabably about the same amount of time Andre has), I would reflexively establish a fresh main repo if I was setting up a project and I wouldn't fork.
This isn't really evidence of anything other than the author of the blog post looking to spin a narrative.
I'm sorry but the article seems pretty biased, and doesn't really give any argument for why what happened would be in any way justified. Author keeps adding their own interpretation to Github comments and events, which — just by looking at the contents — are needlessly negative. For example [1] where commit message states
> We've been continuing to backport bugfixs to the 1.7.x series just for Heroku, but unless Heroku joins Ruby Together I don't have enough time available to make sure that continues to happen.
but OP claims it
> was interpreted as leveraging his control over Bundler as a pay-to-play scheme
I'm sorry but not supporting outdated versions of an open-source tool for a business is perfectly reasonable.
Similarly, [2] was again is described as "was interpreted at the time as indicating the feature would be withheld from Bundler because Heroku had failed to pay Ruby Together.". This is not at all how I read it — the comment just says that the open source project has priorities and not all of them can be implemented given the level of funding it has.
These are just two examples, but the article is riddled with wording like "blatant copying", "brazenly hypocritical", "was interpreted as [a bad thing]" etc.
I just feel like reading a clearly lopsided political piece intended to incite negative emotions towards something/someone. There are just enough facts to make it sound fact-based, but enough of author's own feelings and interpretation that I'm not at all convinced.
In fact, towards the end the author even states that there's been ~6 years where nothing of note happened, before the current drama. That seems like a relatively healthy situation?
[1] https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby/pull/385/com... [2] https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/1811#issuecommen...
I felt the exact same as you while reading the article.
I started reading with an open mind, got a bit confused by the "dongle" joke, which the author doesn't remember but somehow it should be inappropriate. It's equivalent to saying "I think he said something bad 10 years ago but I'm bit really sure"
Then there's the part about "leverage control" to extort heroku, which was a blatant misrepresentation of events and shows a clear Agenda.
Not taking sides my ass. I can only conclude the author's reputation, as being ine of the nicest persons in the community, was earned through similar manipulation.
And since the entire article is a "take my word" type of story, the blatant bias already displayed casta a shadow of doubt over the veracity of any other claims it makes, leading me to conclude the opposite: André is actually a nice and likable person, and has good principles.
I wonder if there's a term for this kind of thing where people use the word "including".
As an example, I might have a non-profit that serves soup at soup kitchens and also pays me to manage it. If someone gives $100k, suppose I pay myself $90k and use $10k to serve soup.
When someone threatens to cut the contribution, I say "This will affect the non-profit's mission since the $100k a year goes to critical things like all the soup served at kitchens".
The impression is to imply that the majority of it goes to the soup. But the majority doesn't, in fact, go to the soup.
It would be useful to have a concise term for this particular kind of deceitfulness.
I know what you’re getting at.
I think you’d call it a type of ‘lie of omission’.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lying_by_omission
But also with some elements of ‘category error’
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Category_mistake
Some languages, such as English, have a term for this -
It's called "lying".
Boy do I have something to tell you about a lot of non-profits...Take Susan G. Komen with breast cancer research...
https://theappalachianonline.com/problems-susan-g-komen/
> In the organization’s 2010-2011 financial report it was revealed that Susan G. Komen only devotes 20.9 percent of the donations it receives to researching breast cancer.
My favorite one is that St Jude has 80 beds. 50% of their funding goes to fundraising or reserves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Jude_Children%27s_Research...
I've been seeing the term "hostage puppies" being used for this for a while now; apparently it is associated with esr, though he himself disclaims credit (https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1891528290676199513).
It may not be a perfect fit since per the tweet, the term does not entail that there is necessarily any deceit or confusion involved - under the hostage model, the soup kitchen may be quite open about pocketing 90% of the money, as long as the implication stands that there will be nobody to distribute the remaining 10% in soup if not for them.
As for the deception/confusion aspect of it, I am not aware of a perfectly-fitting term, but Scott Alexander has been blindly groping other parts of that particular elephant for a while, e.g. in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen... and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-mea.... There is a common thread in that you can effectively mess with people's reasoning by manipulating their category boundaries, and this is not something that we have worked out good defenses against. Is software piracy theft? Is a fund of which 10% go towards charitable causes being used for charity? Is a TV popsci presenter with a BA a scientist?, and so on.
Fraud
Various related context:
Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348390
Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45299170
A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45325792
I'm leaving Ruby Central
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352432
Bundler Belongs to the Ruby Community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371061
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Why do you lay fault with the sponsor pulling funding, and not with the people who opted to have someone so controversial as a speaker, causing the sponsor to pull funding?
Because we all have to get along regardless of what you believe and DHH hasn't advocated for violence against anyone. You can't unperson everyone disagreeable, especially relative to their contributions in the Rails community.
Notice I said Rails community, not Ruby community. Not letting DHH speak at RailsConf is like barring the Pope from the Vatican. There are a lot of big new changes in Rails this year that he has been championing. He was absolutely the right person to give the keynote.
I've seen a Nobel Laureate disinvited from speaking at a conference due to an incredibly offensive statement. Toxic speech has consequences.
> Because we all have to get along regardless of what you believe
False. Freedom of association is a human right. And nobody is obligated to donate their money to a cause or organization they do not support.
Refusing to associate with someone who would like to "Make Britain White Again" (among many other things) is a completely reasonable stance.
https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance
People are free to say whatever they want. And others are free to respond in a variety of ways, including choosing to not provide support.
The paradox of intolerance doesn't kick in only after violence is advocated.
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I'm totally out of the loop. What did DHH do?
Edit: I did a little googling and it sounds like he banned political speech at work? Is that the extent of it? His Wikipedia article doesn't say anything about controversy or racism.
Please read his post on his blog to take your own conclusions, but as I and many other read it his post, basically non white people are incompatible with British culture and immigrants are solely a problem and serve only purpose to foster rape gangs and drug dealers.
He writes about controversial topics on his personal blog, and is on the right side of the political spectrum
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Funny I searched in ecosia "DHH" and as spanish results DHH stands for "Dios Habla Hoy" -> "God Speaks Today"
https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
The most recent thing was saying there has been too much immigration to London, so various leftists are calling him a Nazi, fascist, white supremacist, etc.
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Be that as it may, they effectively entirely handed governance of Ruby Central over to a single party and manufactured a funding crisis that that party used to make drastic change.
This directly damaged the entire Ruby community. Their dollars had influence that they could have used to steer the organization elsewhere, but instead they took their toys away and gave control to the very people they disagreed with.
A system with a single failure point is inherently unstable. It's not a question of if it will fail but when it will fail.
There wasn't a single failure point until Sidekiq pulled their funding, that's why Ruby Central's reaction to impending failure, as you said, was so extreme.
So not a single point of failure but the single action of Sidekiq's pulling funding was the cause... almost as if Sidekiq's funding was the single point of failure.
If this is the reaction of the Ruby Community then no wonder they got themselves into this mess to begin with. Like deciding the intern should be fired for dropping prod and not the CTO who told everyone to use admin permissions for everything.
Maybe the lack of support from all other companies and people to the ruby foundation was the culprit. Sidekiq was help without obligation.
"People aren't allowed to do what they want with their own money only what I want them to do with their money."
Where is this quote from? The person you're replying to didn't say that at all.
They merely highlighted the fact that Perham attempted to punish RubyCentral for their "platforming" of DHH by pulling funding, but instead managed to consolidate power in the hands of those loyal to DHH. Had a bit of a Game of Thrones appeal which is I think why it has had such staying power on HN over the last week.
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This doesn't seem responsive to anything in the linked article.
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First OpenAI, then WordPress and now this. I think we are learning there is a point where VCs using open source become allergic to it. My only suggested solution at this point is to be honest about it. Because only then can solutions emerge.
>The friend explained that Andre believed programmers working on open source tools deserve to earn an income that's commensurate with what salaried engineers earn at the companies who benefit from those tools.
The AUDACITY!
Expecting to get paid for your work.
Every large FOSS ecosystem is going to run into this.
The only exceptions being those with a corporate primary donor , like .net core.
You left out the rest of the paragraph (emphasis mine):
> I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it. I also recall a figure like either $200 or $250 per hour being mentioned as the rate he was effectively paying himself. Whatever the rate actually was, I distinctly remember thinking, "holy shit, that's a lot higher than individual donors would probably assume."
I agree that maintainers of popular open-source projects deserve to be paid enough for a decent standard of living, but $200/hr (* 40hr/wk * 50wk/yr = $400k/yr) is excessive.
$200 /hr is a pretty low consulting rate. You are never going to be 100% utilized, so right off the bat you can divide that $400k by at least 50% over a long period of time. You also have to pay for your own insurance, equipment...
$200 /hr would be what I would consider to be the going rate for any mid level, non-FAANG type developer and pretty fair imho!
Another part of the article mentions him "wasting" money
> Andre needed an adapter, so I ran up to lend him mine. As he was giving it back, I recall him making a half-joking, flippant remark about either his dongle or his computer, saying that "Ruby Together will just buy me another one." It really rubbed me the wrong way. Over the years to follow, more than one person told me stories of Andre paying for shared meals on behalf of Ruby Together without an apparent legitimate justification.
The article also accuses him of misrepresenting if not lying where certain donations went when soliciting more. Presumably, if he had justified reasons to need more funds, he could've said them.
Granted, we don't know how much Andre was making and what his expenses were, and the article seems to have its own biases. But I think at least the general outline of Andre's (and his organization's) funds/expenses should be public and accurate, so potential donors can decide whether he really needs their funds or another project needs them more.
It's a legal requirement for most US non-profits to file public and accurate accounting of their funds and expenses, Ruby Together is no exception and all the info is publicly available [1].
Having previously worked as a software engineer at an ed-tech non-profit, I found nothing nefarious or unusual in Andre receiving compensation for his work or in the anecdotes around expensing business-related technology purchases or meals to his employer, this is all standard industry practice.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...
And in the USA, if you volunteer professional labor, you cannot take it off on your taxes.
So yeah, if I can't get the benefit of taking off of my taxes, I do want paid. Can't afford it otherwise, since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer.
> since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer.
Simultaneously?
You’re taxed for paid labor - you’re not taxed for unpaid labor.
Rich people can donate money, and they take large tax writeoffs for it.
The rest of us have our labor. No matter how professional we are and donate, we cannot get tax writeoffs for donation of our labor.
I am pointing out the hypocrisy of our econo-social class's primary possession, and how the richies get tax writeoffs, and the labor class gets shit on.
You can sell that labor “you cannot afford” to donate to someone else - and donate the money you receive for it. So you get a tax write off instead of getting shat on or whatever.
Are you saying that if you donate your time without pay you would still be taxed as though you _had_ been paid?
No, that's not how it works in the USA - apparently this person wants a tax deduction for their voluntary contribution as if it was a financial contribution to a non-profit which is tax deductible.
You know thats not what I'm saying.
I'm making a larger comparison that most of our resource, which is labor, cannot be donated at the mean cost per hour and taken off of taxes.
However rich people, whose primary resource is money, CAN be taken off on taxes.
Rich people have ways they can donate and shed their tax burden. Whereas average working people cannot volunteer professional labor and take off the same equivalent.
No I don't! I know next to nothing about the American tax system.
In fact it would surprise me if you _could_ somehow reduce your tax burden by doing vountary work.
Seems fine to me if it's well known so that donors know what they're getting.
That's not how you compute yearly earnings from a consulting rate. We consultants need to negotiate contracts, do marketing, accounting, etc. We get sick, we go on vacation and sometimes you're just hustling for clients. Also, that day that you're completely unmotivated, or moody, or hangover, or it was election day and the news are crazy, and you don't write a line of code in the whole day? You still get paid when on a salary, but you don't bill that to a client. 200 * 32 * 42 gives you a much better estimate for a highly productive individual.
The eventual rate paid by Ruby Together settled on $150/hr and has remained that amount for the last decade. Justin’s data is far out of date.
For such a critical piece of software/infrastructure that runs in massive companies making hundreds of millions, this is a rounding error. I literally do not see a single issue with that rate, even in 2000s.
Now the arguments for frivolous spending is definitely an issue that should be criticized, but getting paid to support a massive language ecosystem and SaaS at-large, that’s a non issue at any rate
As a non-profit, the exact amount that Ruby Together paid Andre was publicly disclosed in its annual tax filings [1]:
2015: $29,250
2016: $43,988
2017: $48,143
2018: $51,058
2019: $60,000
2020: $32,693
2021: $21,420
The filings also note that "The entire board of directors reviews and approves (by vote) compensation for the CEO."
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...
400k is about the total comp for most FANG devs. Plus theirs no proof he was constantly billing that.
The only issue is a lack of transparency.
Yeah. Sometimes more than that, even
400k/yr is excessive?
For an open source org that’s running on donations and falsely implying that their donations are going to maintain server costs, yes that’s excessive. If the donations where clearly communicating that they where directly for this persons personal salary then no.
According to TFA they were saying that the donations were to pay "our team".
What would you buy with $400k/yr?
I define a “great” standard of living as roughly: nutritious food (basic meat, vegetables, spices); a home apartment in an area without excessive crime, noise, or pollution; medical care; a couple weeks of vacation per year; ability to frequently purchase cheap things like video games, movie tickets, takeout; ability to rarely purchase more expensive things like high-end technology, quality furniture, very fancy meals; some choice of more frequent vacations, a better apartment/location, fancier everyday food, more things; and everything we take for granted (water, electricity, clean clothes, etc.).
Listing it out it’s actually quite a lot. But is it $400k? I really doubt it (very likely even $100k is more than enough, though inflation will change that). If you or a family member has health issues you may need this much, but that’s the exception (and a failure of health insurance and altruism…)
I'd "buy" increased financial safety (which is better than current or decreased financial safety).
"Excessive" is obviously a subjective measurement. At times I don't think that HN's median audience appreciates that a 400k/yr salary is objectively extremely high, even for software engineers, even in 2025. A "mere" $367K/yr total compensation puts you in the 90th percentile of SWE earnings. I know Google, Facebook, and a few others greatly exceed that in total compensation at their higher SWE levels, but they're probably not the baseline you should be looking at across the industry.
I would personally say that $400K/yr for being an open source developer is fantastic, although I appreciate that that's also subjective. Even in Silicon Valley, though, $400K/yr would net you about $18K/month, which would be enough to live quite comfortably while still socking away more than half of your income for retirement.
it's really important to not compare freelance and W2 salaries directly. freelance gets 10% off the top immediately for social security and Medicare taxes that employers usually pay. next is your health insurance which will eat another couple thousand a year. then you have to remember that as freelance you don't get paid for vacation and sick time, so there goes another ~10%. also, you're not getting paid for all the hours. if you spend a day without work to do as a freelance, you don't get payed for it. $200 an hour is still a good salary, but it's not $400k a year. it's probably closer to $250k
The next two sentences:
> As such, Andre's goal with Ruby Together was characterized as an effort to fund development activities—initially his own, but eventually others—by paying themselves a market hourly rate. I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it.
You're misrepresenting the article.
Removed
Edit: Decided to remove. Incase original article is wrong.
Programmers need to grow up and dispense with this belief.
They’d like to imagine a world where there’s no such thing as sales and marketing, where they can interact with humans and especially business manager types who tell them what to build as little as possible.
So many developers seem to genuinely not understand why their contributions to software used by millions don’t magically generate income.
If you’re a FOSS developer you need to grow up and do one of the following rather than moaning about not being paid:
1. Accept that you’re not getting paid and do the work as an exercise in personal growth and enjoyment. Don’t make it your job and don’t do burnout-inducing things like providing support for free.
2. Come up with a business model. Learn something about sales and marketing. E.g., nginx plus.
3. Get a corporate sponsor and deal with having a manager type telling you what to do and/or corporate employees steering the direction of your project.
I don't agree. You can have a good life from Open source. The problem is that people assumes the money that keeps rails and whatever going is guaranteed and that no one should contribute too because it is free.
Sidekiq has all the right to remove the support for someone they find troublesome and can harm their image.
Now if another company is able to take full control is because there were never anyone else doing that. It seems pure luck that Sidekiq never pushed their own coup themselves, probably they are just good guys.
Expecting to get paid for open source work is like expecting that people don't pay you for cookies they take from your store labeled "Free Cookies."
But if you take my cookies, add sprinkles then resell them, I can expect a modest donation to keep the bakery running.
Otherwise I'm going to run out of flour and no one gets cookies.
This is the original sin of FOSS. Large mega corps end up taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth while only contributing when they feel like it.
At least with . net core Microsoft ultimately pays the bills. No one knows how other independent FOSS projects are supposed to be funded.
You can’t expect anything that isn’t in the original agreement. If you want to sell software, sell it!
If you don’t want a megacorp using your software, don’t give it away. Or license it such that they can’t do what you don’t want them to do.
This retroactive take backs shit is so, so bad for everyone involved.
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