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How Ruby Went Off the Rails

What happened to RubyGems, Bundler, and the Open Source drama that controls the internet infrastructure.
How Ruby Went Off the Rails
Photo by Tania C / Unsplash

For the past couple of weeks, a community of developers who use the programming language Ruby have been closely following a dramatic change in ownership of some of the most essential tools in its ecosystem with far reaching impacts for the worldwide web. 

If you’re not familiar with Ruby or the open source development community, you probably haven’t heard about any of this, but the tools in question serve as critical infrastructure for gigantic internet services like GitHub, Shopify, and others, so any disruption to them would be catastrophic to those companies, their users, and vast swaths of the internet.