[davidcelis]

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

[hitekker]

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.

[wgjordan]

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.