top | item 45490924

(no title)

Given some of the ways Andre Arko gets described (See https://justin.searls.co/posts/why-im-not-rushing-to-take-si... for a recent overview) I'm a little wary of what the motivation behind this is.

discuss

busterarm|4 months ago

To take the maximally negative view of things:

    - uv is a cool tool, but Astral has signaled their intention to have it tie in nicely to paid services.
    - that's a nice moat!
    - Andre & friends saw that in the Python community (and uv's success) and decided they could do the same for Ruby
    - Their collective announces rv and now wants to make us dependent on them & friends for Ruby Gems.
    - After Hashicorp and others, I'm extremely wary of orgs luring me in with free shit.  Hashicorp is maybe the lightest example of this but they're very intentional about enterprise-walling business-essential features.
    - I don't want the Ruby ecosystem dependent on one party or even a tiny collective of people.  This is just as bad to me as the Ruby Central situation right now.

ljm|4 months ago

The Ruby ecosystem is already decentralised in that there is no single source of truth for published gems. You can pull the source from any software forge that uses git, you can point to any self hosted gem server or use something like Artifactory or GitHub package registry. You can vendor the code if you want.

This entire post is practically the case in point, except I’m not clear on how they got real time sync with RubyGems and if any other competitor would have the same capability.

To use Astral and uv as an example, they would have to fork PyPI and maintain all the infra for that and not just the tool that manages the dependencies.

davidcelis|4 months ago

By "Astral" do you mean "Spinel"? Also, what paid services? So far the only paid services they've mentioned is retainer services that essentially amount to priority customer support. The tools themselves are only ever described as free

EDIT: Misread the comment and thought it was only about `rv`, not both `uv` and `rv`

kimos|4 months ago

This reads like a hit piece based on a personal vendetta. I'd be careful how much weight to give this.

nomdep|4 months ago

> When Ruby Together first launched in 2015, the website suggested donations went to pay "our team" (...) This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.

This a fact. By this alone I don't think Andre Arko is an honest person.

directionless|4 months ago

TBH the whole thing is pretty opaque. There are a lot of accusations floating around. It's pretty easily to capitalize on "Big evil shopify is making a takeover", but I suspect there's a lot more happening behind the scenes.

dismalaf|4 months ago

Does it? Seems pretty detailed with plenty of easily verifiable details...

directionless|4 months ago

To follow up here, it sure sounds like Andre is not entirely acting in good faith.

https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-ev... discusses that a precipitating event was Andre asking for a copy of the http access logs to monetize them.

I think this is confirmed by Mike Perham's comment in https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1o2bxol/comment/ninn6...

> In this case I have first hand knowledge since he pitched me on the idea: would Sidekiq, being a big sponsor of Ruby Central in the past, be interested if rubygems could somehow use the remote IP to identify the companies downloading the sidekiq gem so I could use that to upsell those companies

daniel_black|4 months ago

^^^ THIS ^^^! This is not being highlighted enough.