As I said in the follow up the other issue is that the blog post describes the organization’s actions as part of the org’s fiduciary duties. But Thomas is right: the organization doesn’t have fiduciary duties. Its board members have fiduciary duties to protect the organization itself.

The legalese argument doesn’t hold up because *Ruby Central* does not have fiduciary duties. Its board members have fiduciary duties to Ruby Central itself.

My guess is this was written by a lawyer to convey the idea that Ruby Central is entrusted with the ecosystem without thinking through the financial sense of “fiduciary” that most people will read it and understand.

They definitely do have fiduciary duties in the legal sense, as you say. However I think Thomas’s point is basically correct: what they said is that they have “a fiduciary duty to safeguard the supply chain and protect the long-term stability of the ecosystem” which is not really true.

It’s also conspicuous to me how burned out he is. He said outright in the Rails World keynote that he couldn’t be bothered to extract a library from Campfire and made it free so someone else would do it. He’s completely stopped talking about development. It’s 24/7 bigotry and tinkering with Linux.

My pet theory for years now has been that DHH is saying all this cynically because his rich friends are thinking this way and because Republicans were more receptive to his “anti-Big Tech” crusade during the Hey email-Apple war. (Which tbc is awful and if anything I think makes it worse.)

Again, I don’t mean it personally. People make their own decisions about who they will or will not work for and why. Lord knows I’ve done it myself. But I can’t take your word for it in this circumstance.

I don’t mean this as a rude question, but does anybody on the Ruby Central board who does not work for Shopify or 37signals think this is fine? That’s who I want to hear from. I’m not attacking you personally, but working for Tobi and DHH simply renders you not credible on this question.

You would think if any web community would be capable of ridding itself of the Nazi cancer it would be Ruby (and Rails). But nope!