On some singular points I disagree with Arko. For instance, the bundler/gem situation - while he mentions the trademark issue, and I have no comment to make about this, ruby itself naturally should provide and have a use case for distributing code to other people. Other languages have that too, see Rust + cargo.

On other points I agree, and it is really unfortunate how things changed. I remember having used ruby before gems existed; then I think four guys (if I recall correctly) created gems within some days. From there it became more widely used.

Fast forward some time, until recently, and things really changed to the worse. The first time I noticed this was when suddenly shopify corporate hackers spawned over everywhere and, strangely enough, tried to dictate corporate behaviour and rules onto the ruby ecosystem. Tons of ruby devs were all employed by shopify, and shopify here behaved very strangely overall. The isssues were not the same as github and then github-Microsoft - something is really strange with shopify. One shopify corporate dev demanded that everyone must verify who they are before publishing to rubygems; another shopify dev tried to lecture me in how to use the official ruby tracker. I used that one for almost 15 years before and some young 20-years older corporate hacker suddenly tries to lecture people +twice their own age. Then suddenly the rules for rubygems.org also changed, to appease a corporate agenda:

They can hijack gems and not bother to notify you. (Naturally they need to be able to distribute the code, otherwise the gem ecosystem would make no sense, but look at the legalese crap - that is now a project under corporate control.)

What made me actually retire, after trying to talk some sense into these new accounts that seized control, was the 100.000 download limit. Past that point I can no longer remove my code (unless I delete my profile, which I did, since I don't accept shopify or whoever else hijack my code; note that on github I can remove my own code no matter how many downloads occurred. I also told rubygems.org to host gems THEY want to offer themselves, rather than abuse and force-restrict ruby developers as the 100k download limit was. That was the year before Hiroshi Shibata mass-purged ruby developers.)

The real tragedy, though, is not the in-fight between Arko and RubyCentral, whoever is the new corporate Overlord. The real tragedy is that financial interests can totally pwn an ecosystem. And unfortunately, I am also 100% certain that Hiroshi Shibata did not act on his own but had direct approval by matz, which makes this even more problematic. But anyway, I think rather than dwell on the past, one another disagreement I have with arko is that there indeed has to be a way to move forward. This won't be easy. IMO, the structure of ruby should be changed, to completely disentangle any financial interest that keeps on driving policy changes. That is, in my opinion, the biggest issue - while I blame shopify for the most part, the whole situation could be exploited by any other big money giver too. That's not good. That's not healthy. That should change.

The whole notion of constantly shuffling in different people into RubyCentral, in hope that this will "fix everything" ... is naive. That's not going to work. IMO, the better approach was when gems was run by people from the community. Yes, I understand the issue of funding and time allocation so I am not saying it has to be the way it used to be, even though I found the early days of ruby + gems MUCH much better than the shopify era (I am not even going into what DHH writes - even AI would get angry at having to write what DHH writes nowadays).

Unfortunately this is now a chicken-egg problem, because ruby is struggling - and declining, let's be honest here. The language in and by itself is great and I don't think anyone ever claimed otherwise about the language itself, it is well-designed. But the ecosystem changed, both due to external and internal reasons, and it has not changed to the better, IMO.

Ruby Central's Destructive Legacy