I was sitting in my garden with a bowl of ice cream in near-total darkness not long ago. It was just after 10pm, not late by any standards except those of a new parent. My two-year-old daughter was asleep upstairs, but who knew for how long, or how many times she might wake up. Still, my desire to witness one of the greatest evolutionary paradoxes on Earth was stronger than the  pull of my bed.

I had been speaking to scientists who study the vision of a common, but rarely observed, type of moth: The elephant hawkmoth. This moth doesn’t just have nighttime vision, it can see color even on a moonless night. Big cats, bulbous-eyed monkeys, and owls all have excellent eyesight to locate and catch their nocturnal prey, but they are all guided by shades of black and white. 

What this insect does every summer night was once thought impossible. The species, Deilephila elpenor, was first named by Carl Linneaus in 1758, but only in 2002 was its color vision discovered. As Almut Kelber wrote—perhaps with a hint of exasperation at our own anthropocentrism—that year in the journal Nature: “Humans are color-blind at night, and it has been assumed that this is true of all animals.” But her experiments with a halogen bulb and a range of UV filters demonstrated that these animals could pick out their favorite yellow flowers at light levels akin to dim starlight, a simulated nighttime 100 million times darker than a sunlit day. 

Put another way, these insects were choosing their favorite flower without the light of the moon or sun. They were using the scraps of photons from distant stars. Considering that the closest star system is more than four light-years away, this means that elephant hawkmoths are using a source of illumination that first shined forth from a distant star long before their great-great-grandmoths were born. 

Little by little, the bird balloons outward, its angular silhouette cultivating curves.

Relying on so few photons for color vision means that elephant hawkmoths are using summation, a process similar to long exposure photography. By pausing their photosensitive cells until they’ve been bathed in enough photons, they can create a blurry but still accurate image of flowers and their colors. But Eric Warrant, a vision scientist at Lund University and colleague of Kelber’s, told me that even this might not fully explain nighttime color vision. “I don’t think it’s the whole picture,” he said. 

Wondering whether I should finish the whole tub of ice cream and call it a night, I heard a loud thrumming noise coming over our garden wall. An elephant hawkmoth was flitting among the honeysuckle flowers, and I tried to get close enough to decipher any color. I couldn’t. Grabbing my daughter’s crab net I wondered whether I could catch the insect and take a look with my phone’s flashlight. But I hesitated. Guided by distant stars and seeing colors that I could no longer discern made this animal seem almost mythological in that moment. To ensnare it, even for an instant, seemed akin to caging a unicorn.

Only the width of my pinky finger, this insect was part of a story much larger than myself, a marriage of millions of years of evolution and the nuclear fusion of distant stars. And so I stood, green net in my hand, a half-eaten tub of ice cream steps away, my eyes barely able to discern the elephant hawkmoth as it flew back over the wall into the darkness.  

With a speckled brown plumage and a long, slightly upturned beak, the bar-tailed godwit is an unremarkable-looking shorebird. Every year, it forages for worms and clams buried in the mudflats of the Arctic and its physique starts to change. Little by little, the bird balloons outward, its angular silhouette cultivating curves. The breast muscles suddenly seem to engulf the entire body. The bird metamorphoses into a softball shape, only with a beak sticking out the front.

It hasn’t actually become more muscular, though, as its flight muscles have been idle for months. Instead, it has become obese. By the end of the boreal summer, more than 50 percent of its body weight is fat (morbid obesity in humans is defined as 40 percent of body weight). In order to take off, one Arctic researcher told me, the birds often need to wait for an updraft.

And yet, the bar-tailed godwit is an extraordinary athlete. While these birds don’t travel as far as some other migrating birds—just between Alaska and New Zealand—they do it all in one go. A non-stop, trans-Pacific flight that can take eight to nine days. Powered by their enormous deposits of fat, these birds are essentially “obese super athletes,” as one researcher puts it. 

I found one water bear in a clump of cushion moss outside our kitchen window.

The difference between obesity in humans and obesity in the animal kingdom is twofold. The first, and best known, is where the fat is deposited. We store fat around our organs (so-called visceral fat), which can restrict their function, while birds—and whales and bears—store their fat under their skin, subcutaneously, which can help protect against the cold. But for obese athletes like the bar-tailed godwit, fat is stored in 16 locations around the body, including around the intestines.

It is how they transport this fat around the body that is so important. Just as oil sits atop a glass of water, fats can’t flow through a (largely water-based) bloodstream the way sugars do. They are insoluble. To get around this, migrating birds like bar-tailed godwits pump their bodies full of molecular guides—known as lipoproteins—that can latch onto fats (or lipids) that are released from their storage sites, shepherding them to where they are needed: primarily the lungs and flight muscles.

“And that’s where mammals fall behind,” says Chris Guglielmo, a researcher at University of Western Ontario who studies migratory birds. “We’re terrible at the transport side [of utilizing fats]. Even when we run marathons, we have to rely on glycogen and glucose … we don’t rely on fat very well.”

First seen under a microscope in the 1770s, water bears have long stumped scientists and enthusiasts alike. How can a squishy, adorable animal less than a millimeter long survive boiling, freezing to near-absolute zero temperatures, and radiation blasts that would kill a human in seconds?

In recent years, scientists working on two species of tardigrade—Hypsibius exemplaris and Ramazzottius varieornatus—have found that their endurance derives from two sources: They produce extraordinary levels of repair proteins to patch up their internal machinery and possess another protein, unique to them, that thwarts destruction in the first place, aptly named the damage suppressor.    

To talk of tardigrades is to be suffocated by superlatives. They possess the kind of indestructibility typically reserved for comic book heroes. It is easy to forget that these creatures are real, that they inhabit this Earth, that they are our neighbors and distant relatives in the Kingdom Animalia. And that they are abundant: Wherever there is water you will likely find water bears, from meltwater pockets in Greenland’s glaciers to the moss growing on the wall outside your home. With a $10 microscope, I found one in a clump of cushion moss outside our kitchen window.

The two laboratory favorites—Hypsibius and Rammazotius—are representatives of a large and ancient phylum that includes 1,380 known species. Tardigrade taxonomists think at least twice that number exists. While those species living on land have been most closely studied and sampled, water bears also inhabit marine ecosystems—particularly within the grains of sand in the seabed. Whereas most land-based species have claws at the ends of their legs, marine species have sucker-like discs that allow them to trundle along the seafloor.

And then there’s the aptly named Tanarctus  bubulubus. Discovered in the seabed off the coast of the Faroe Islands, this marine species of water bear has 16 to 20 balloon-like organs attached to its rear end, elaborate structures that the animal uses as buoyancy aids in the water and adhesive anchors in the sediment. Floating through the depths, this water bear looks forever ready to celebrate a birthday party. Indeed, just knowing that T. bubulubus is tumbling somewhere out there in the middle of the ocean seems a fact worthy of celebration.

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Lead image: Imogen Warren / Shutterstock

They say my generation is wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment. But I think things are worse than that. We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it.

We have been posting about our lives for a long time. But now I notice something else, something more than a compulsion to capture and share moments. I see people turning into TV characters, their memories into episodes, themselves into entertainment. We have become the meaningless content, swiped past and scrolled through. Experiences, relationships, even our own children, are cheapened, packaged, churned out for others to consume. For some of us growing older has become a series of episodes to release: first the proposal, then the wedding, followed by house tours, pregnancy reveals, every milestone and update, on and on, forever. We exist to entertain each other.

For influencers, of course, this is their career. They turn their lives into TV series. We have trailers and teasers. We have cliffhangers, season finales, reminders to “tune in next week!” We have stock characters and cameos. Cult followings and conventions. Running gags and cold opens. Theme songs and end credits. Christmas specials and cross-over episodes. Press tours and plot twists. Spin-off shows and sneak peeks; bloopers and “behind-the-scenes.”

They market their memories, too. Previously on…COMING UP…Proposal now available on all platforms! Help us search for our new home! (*emotional*). Watch the wedding Part 1 and Part 2! “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the podcast you’ve been waiting for,” declares one couple, flashing upcoming scenes like a film trailer. “IT’S FINALLY HERE…OUR BIGGEST EPISODE YET … IT’S ... THE … WEDDING.”

Then come the content babies. Babies as props; babies for clicks. I used to tell myself this wasn’t true but I have this horrible feeling now that some couples are having children for views. Out of one pregnancy you get all this content: finding out, telling friends and family, going to scans, monthly, even weekly bumpdates, the gender reveal, name hints, name reveal, babymoon, baby shower, nursery tour, pack my hospital bag with me—and that’s all before birth. EARLY ACCESS to the NEW BABY for paying subscribers!. Baby number two dropping soon! 51 HOURS OF UNMEDICATED LABOR streaming live on YouTube (“hope you enjoyed!”)

But the best episodes, of course, are the worst days. EXPLOSIVE arguments exclusively on YouTube. THE SCARIEST NIGHT OF OUR LIVES available now. Stay tuned for the divorce. Link in bio to the breakup announcement. Arguments are interrupted by ad breaks; breakdowns are brought to you by BetterHelp. Emotional meltdowns are hit episodes; a family falling apart is a series on Amazon Prime. We always talk about the freedom of alternative media, that ordinary people are finally in control, forgetting that we accidentally cast ourselves as characters, that we are the actors now, that the show must go on. This is the career everyone wants; the one that never ends.

I worry about young people imitating these influencers. The disappointment they are setting themselves up for: when life gets low ratings, if the new season flops. This is the trade. By inviting strangers to watch, you not only welcome praise and adoration but critics too — ready to review the show, comment on the character development, poke holes in the plot, follow the franchise. Your baby belongs to us now; your marriage competes on the market. Sell yourself like a product and get treated like one. And the worst part is that these influencers think their views go up because people care, because they finally matter, forgetting they have declared themselves entertainment.

Marketing your memories also desecrates them. You hand over your hope, your hurt, your life to be consumed, reducing it to reality TV. Your precious memories are my mindless entertainment. Your trauma becomes my background noise. Your life-shattering divorce my slop. Your children my characters; your pain my distraction; your feelings my filler episodes. I will swipe past your birth video when I get bored. I will downvote your divorce if it isn’t entertaining enough. Your life is what I clean my kitchen to, what I kill time with. And if you fail to entertain me, fine, I will scroll for another life to consume.

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It will never be enough either. You can’t excitedly share the beginning of your relationship but not explain why you broke up. Where’s he gone? What happened to that storyline? You can’t change your opinions or interests; that’s out of character. You can’t disappear for a while; you’ll be behind schedule. You are ours; the audience you owe everything to. Influencers invite us in and then can’t get us out. And when we get bored, well, the customer is always right. Stage some drama, start a rumour, parade your child, plan a plot twist. Something, anything, so we don’t change the channel.

And then there’s the worst thought. How long would these couples last without the cameras? How would these families feel if the internet shut down, if they had to compliment and compromise and sacrifice without the validation of strangers? Would they know how? Without comments and clapping emojis? Can they live without it anymore — adulthood without applause? I fear some young people only understand these things — marriage, parenthood, obligations to others — as transactions. We can go through the pain of giving birth and sacrifice of raising children so long as it is captured, recorded, shared, so long as we get likes, comments, praise. Otherwise why? Doing it for nothing? It’s the same feeling as dressing up and not getting a good Instagram pic; it all seems worthless, pointless unless it is posted. Why look good without getting a selfie; why go out without uploading a Story? Why commit. Why have children. Why do anything that cannot be exchanged on the market. We are products and so if we cannot sell what is the point. We were raised on recognition, a generation sustained by likes and attention and advertising ourselves, and without it we are nothing.

We tell ourselves this is for memories. Sentimental, some say. So sentimental that children won’t read their parents’ love letters or dust off polaroids from the attic, but scroll through their parents’ Instagram posts, watch their YouTube Shorts and TikTok pranks, skip past mummy’s sponsorships. They will have clickbait to comfort them, nostalgia for Stories and Reels, fond memories of AI thumbnails. No, every day I am becoming more convinced that this is the furthest thing from sentimental, this marketing of memories. That the couples who barely remember their engagement, when it was, what they said, have something far more human than those who orchestrated the whole thing, rehearsed it, recorded it, set up a background, put on a soulless display for strangers.

And that we should want the opposite. I want I love you said when we are the only two people in the world to witness it, the words intruded by nothing and nobody, so clumsy they can’t be captioned or subtitled. I want the pregnancy revealed in the middle of the night, bleary-eyed in the bathroom, holding hands instead of iPhones, looking into each other’s eyes instead of a lens. I want the gender reveal whispered without cannons and confetti and cameras; to give birth without thumbnails thought up from hospital beds, or retakes and rehearsals in delivery rooms. And when I have children I want them to listen to my memories, to hear my stories, as I use my own words to tell them what it was like, where we were, how I felt, not hand them a phone so they can scroll through my Instagram.

We look back with horror at previous generations, that they didn’t celebrate enough, couldn’t capture the moment, have no memories to scroll through. But I will reserve my horror for what we are doing. That partners are being chosen, boyfriends are getting down on one knee, babies are being born, not out of love or devotion or human instinct, but because views are down. Ratings are dropping. Storylines are needed. The audience is getting impatient.

We know how this show ends, though. The same as every other. Someday this generation, these influencers, will discover with dread what every celebrity and contestant and cast member has realized before them. That after offering everything up, every inch of their lives, every finite moment on this Earth, it does not matter how much they stage, how much they rehearse, how much they trade, how long they leave the cameras rolling, we will always wonder, eventually, what else is on?

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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. 

On September 19, Ruby Central, a nonprofit organization that manages RubyGems.org, a platform for sharing Ruby code and libraries, asserted control over several GitHub repositories for Ruby Gems as well as other critical Ruby open source projects that the rest of the Ruby development community relies on. A group of open source developers who had contributed to those projects and maintained them for years had their permissions suddenly revoked. When these developers announced on social media that their access was taken away, many Ruby developers saw the decision as a betrayal of their years-long contributions to the Ruby ecosystem and open source principles more generally. Others accused Ruby Central of succumbing to corporate pressure from companies like Shopify, which they claimed wanted more control over the project. 

In some ways, this whole affair is an example of why this stuff gets really messy when people start getting paid

I’ve spent the last week talking to people who had direct involvement with Ruby Central’s decision, the contributors who were ousted, and developers in the Ruby community. I’ve heard accusations of greed, toxic personalities, and stories about years-long feuds between people, at times in open disagreement, who ultimately govern some of these important open source tools. 

RubyGems.org and other critical Ruby tools have so far not been interrupted during this transition, but the incident sheds light on a basic truth about the internet and open source development: Much of the technology we use every day and take for granted is being maintained by a small number of developers who are not compensated for that work or get paid very little when compared to salaries at big tech companies. Open source development continues to make much of the internet possible, but as some of these tools become more important and financially valuable, they’re subject to more scrutiny and pressure from the community, organizations, and companies that rely on them. 

“In some ways, this whole affair is an example of why this stuff gets really messy when people start getting paid, and once you start introducing formal organizations and employees and nonprofits and lawyers and all this kind of complexity,” Mike McQuaid, developer of the popular package manager Homebrew, which is built with Ruby, told me. McQuaid has talked to and offered to mediate between Ruby Central and the ousted maintainers. “This is a textbook case of what happens when there's this conflict between what companies want, what nonprofit individuals want, how much responsibility people have when they take money, who gets control and when. How much democracy versus just ‘I have the power to do something, therefore I'm going to do it.’” 

With Ruby developers can download and use self-contained packages of code that add different functionalities to a Ruby project. These packages are called gems, and are distributed primarily via RubyGems.org, where developers can upload gems they’ve developed or download gems from other developers. 

The ability to download gems and plug them into different projects is very useful and convenient for Ruby developers, but can create complications. Different gems are developed by different teams and are updated at different times with bug fixes and new features, and might not necessarily be compatible or play well with one another as they evolve. 

This is where Bundler comes in. As its website explains, “Bundler provides a consistent environment for Ruby projects by tracking and installing the exact gems and versions that are needed.” So, for example, if a developer is building a Ruby project and wants to use gems X, Y, and Z, Bundler will pull the versions of those gems that are compatible with one another, providing developers an easy solution for what Bundler describes as “dependency hell.”

Bundler is an open source project that was initially developed by Yehuda Katz, but the GitHub repository for the project was created and was administrated by André Arko. In 2015, Arko also founded a nonprofit trade organization named Ruby Together, which raised funds from developers and companies that use Ruby in order to maintain Bundler and other open source tools. 

I will not mince words here: This was a hostile takeover

RubyGems.org, the site and service, is governed by Ruby Central, a nonprofit founded in 2001, which also organizes several Ruby conferences like RubyConf and RailsConf. In 2022, Arko’s Ruby Together and Ruby Central merged, “uniting the Ruby community’s leading events and infrastructure under one roof,” according to Ruby Central’s site. Bundler’s and RubyGems.org’s work often overlapped both in their goals and the developers who worked on them, but operated across two different GitHub organizations, each with its own repositories. To streamline development of these open source projects, Bundler also joined the Ruby Gems GitHub organization in 2022. 

In 2023, Ruby Central established the Open Source Software Committee, which according to its site oversees RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org, focusing on infrastructure stability, security, and sustainability.

A confusing and central point of disagreement between Ruby Central and the maintainers it ousted on September 19 is rooted in the merging of Ruby Together and Ruby Central and the difference between RubyCentral.org the service, essentially an implementation of the Ruby Gems codebase on an AWS instance, which both parties agree Ruby Central owns and operates, and the Ruby Gems the codebase that lives in the same GitHub organization as Bundler. 

According to a recording of a mid-September Zoom meeting which I obtained between Marty Haught, Ruby Central’s Director of Open Source, Arko, and the other ousted contributors, Ruby Central maintains that the codebase and GitHub organization became its responsibility when Ruby Central merged with Ruby Together in 2022. The ousted contributors’ position is that members of Ruby Central, like Haught, can be owners of the GitHub organization, but that ownership of the RubyGems codebase and other projects in the GitHub organization belong to the contributors, who don’t have a detailed governance model but historically have governed by consensus. 

Arko made this argument to me in a recent interview, but also outlined that argument in a blog post, where he also shared the merger agreement between Ruby Central and Ruby Together. It shows that Ruby Together would dissolve and that Ruby Central would be in charge of raising and allocating funds for development, but does not explicitly say Ruby Central takes ownership of the RubyGems and Bundler projects or the GitHub organization. 

To make matters even more complicated, Arko was at once a contributor to these open source projects, a contributor to RubyGems.org the service, an owner of the GitHub organization, and an advisor to Ruby Central’s Open Source Software Committee. 

In May, Arko resigned his position as an advisor to Ruby Central’s Open Source Software Committee, but continued his work as a contributor. Arko told me he resigned his advisory role because of Ruby Central’s last minute invitation of David Heinemeier Hansson, better known online as DHH, as a keynote speaker at RailsConf.

Arko told me he objected to that decision because of DHH’s “horrifying, racist, misogynist, politics” and DHH’s “personal vendetta” against him. In 2021, back at Motherboard, we reported that many employees at DHH’s company, Basecamp, quit after his decision to ban any discussion of politics at work, which many employees saw as squashing discussion about race, bias, and diversity. Arko told me that DHH’s “personal vendetta” against him stemmed from Arko not wanting to support a certain feature DHH wanted added to Bundler, after which DHH demanded Arko be removed from the Ruby Together board. 

The current controversy erupted on social media on September 19, when one contributor to the open source projects in the RubyGems and Bundler GitHub organization, Ellen Dash, announced that Haught, Ruby Central’s Director of Open Source, revoked GitHub organization membership for all admins on the RubyGems, Bundler, and RubyGems.org maintainer teams. At that moment, their permissions and access to the GitHub organization were revoked, meaning they could no longer make any changes or contributions to the code, and Haught, representing Ruby Central, took control. 

“I will not mince words here: This was a hostile takeover,” Dash said in a public “goodbye” letter she shared online. “I consider Ruby Central’s behavior a threat to the Ruby community as a whole. The forceful removal of those who maintained RubyGems and Bundler for over a decade is inherently a hostile action. Ruby Central crossed a line by doing this.”

The news was seen by many developers in the Ruby and open source community as betraying the dedication and labor that Dash, Arko, and other maintainers put into these tools for years. 

Ruby Central, meanwhile, describes the move as one centered around security. 

“With the recent increase of software supply chain attacks, we are taking proactive steps to safeguard the Ruby gem ecosystem end-to-end,” Ruby Central said in an explanation of its decision. “To strengthen supply chain security, we are taking important steps to ensure that administrative access to the RubyGems.org, RubyGems, and Bundler is securely managed. This includes both our production systems and GitHub repositories. In the near term we will temporarily hold administrative access to these projects while we finalize new policies that limit commit and organization access rights. This decision was made and approved by the Ruby Central Board as part of our fiduciary responsibility. In the interim, we have a strong on-call rotation in place to ensure continuity and reliability while we advance this work. These changes are designed to protect critical infrastructure that power the Ruby ecosystem, whether you are a developer downloading gems to your local machine [or] a small or large team who rely on the safety and availability of these tools.”

404 Media has covered the kind of recent supply chain attacks targeting open source projects that Ruby Central is referring to. Earlier this month, a critical JavaScript development tool Node Package Manager (NPM), was targeted by a similar supply chain attack. But not everyone in the Ruby development community bought the explanation that security was at the heart of the recent moves. One reason for that is a public statement from a Ruby Central board member and treasurer Freedom Dumalo. 

On Substack, Dumalo apologized for the sudden change and how it was communicated. 

“If Ruby Central made a critical mistake, it's here,” he wrote. “Could these conversations have been happening in public? Could the concerns we were hearing from companies, users and sponsors have been made more apparent? Probably. But I remind you we don't have a ‘communications team’, no real PR mechanism, we are all just engineers who (like many of you I'm sure) go heads down on a problem until it's solved.”

Dumalo reiterated that RubyGems and Bundler are critical infrastructure that are now increasingly under the threat of supply chain attacks, and said that the companies that rely on them “count” on Ruby Central do everything it can to keep them and their users safe.

However, Dumalo also said that Ruby Central was under “deadline” to make this change. 

“Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going,” Dumalo wrote. 

In a September 22 video message in response to criticism about its decision to remove maintainers, Ruby Central’s executive director Shan Cureton described a similar dynamic. She said “sponsors and companies who depend on Ruby tooling came to us with supply chain concerns” and that “Our funding and sponsorships are directly tied to our ability to demonstrate strong operational standards. Without those standards in place, it becomes harder to secure the support needed to keep maintainers paid, organize events, and provide resources for developers at every stage of their journey.”

Since Shopify is one of the primary sponsors and funders of Ruby Central, this led some in the Ruby community to believe that Shopify was exerting pressure on Ruby Central to make this change. 

“That is not how it happened, and I wish I had been more careful with my wording in that blog post,” Dumalo told me in a Linkedin message when I asked him if Ruby Central was under pressure from Shopify to make these changes.

I just don't think that there's any other plausible explanation than Shopify demanded this.

After I gave Dumalo my number so we could do a phone interview, I got an email from Cindi Sutera, who was recently brought on as a spokesperson for Ruby Central.

"Ruby Central’s mission is to keep the infrastructure that Rubyists rely on stable, safe, and trustworthy,” she told me. “As part of a routine review following organizational changes, we identified a small number of accounts whose privileges no longer matched current role requirements. The Board voted that it was imperative to align access with our privilege policy to keep the infrastructure that the Ruby community depends on stable. This is our mission.”

Sutera said that the board approved “a temporary administrative hold on certain elevated permissions” while it finalized operator agreements and governance roles.

“To move quickly and transparently, we imposed a clear deadline to complete operator agreements and close gaps,” she said. “We could have communicated earlier that we felt it necessary to move quickly and wish we could have given the community more time to prepare for this action. And now, here we are committed to completing this transition for the stability and security of the Ruby Gems supply chain. More updates are coming as we work through security protocols and stabilization efforts.”

“There’s literally only one company providing the money that is keeping Ruby Central open, and it is Shopify,” Arko told me. “And so I just don't think that there's any other plausible explanation than Shopify demanded this.”

When I asked Arko why he thought Ruby Central removed him, if it wasn’t for security reasons, Arko said: “totally unprovable speculation is Shopify’s CEO is best friends with DHH, who hates me.” DHH is also a Shopify board member. 

“Thanks for the invitation, but not my place to weigh in a lot on this while they're working through these changes,” DHH told me in an email when reached for comment. “But I support them taking steps to secure and professionalize the supply chain work they're doing.”

Shopify did not reply to a request for comment. 

As this episode spread on social media, I talked to several people associated with Ruby Central who told me the board was acting in the interest of the RubyGems and the Ruby community. Two sources who asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation said that Arko was difficult to work with, questioned how he used funds raised by Ruby Together, and claimed that a new Ruby version manager he’s working on, rv, means he has a conflict of interest with his work on RubyGems and Bundler. 

Arko acknowledged to me he heard he’s been difficult to work with in the past. He said that sometimes he’s been able to reach out to people directly and resolve any issues, and that sometimes he hasn’t. He rejected the other allegations, and said that Ruby Together’s financials have always been public.

“It has always been fully public, and the amount has been fixed at $150 an hour for 10 years,” he said, referring to the amount contributors got paid to work on Bundler. Arko added that nobody has ever been paid for more than 20 hours a week, and that the most he’s been able to raise in a single year is $300,000 to pay eight different contributors. “Nobody has gotten a raise for 10 years.”

"As a matter of policy, we don’t discuss individual personnel,” Sutera, the Ruby Central spokesperson, said when I asked if Arko was removed from the GitHub organization because of his previous behavior. “Our recent actions were organization-wide governance measures aimed at aligning access with policy. Our priority is maintaining a stable and secure Ruby Gems supply chain."

McQuaid, the developer of Homebrew and who followed the controversy, told me that even Arko’s harshest critics wouldn’t deny the contributions he’s made to the Ruby community over the years. 

Regarding Arko’s blog post about his removal, McQuaid told me it’s good that Arko is crediting other people for their contribution and that he’s following open source principles of community and transparency, but that “his ‘transparency’ here has been selective to things that benefit him/his narrative, he seems unwilling or unable to admit that he failed as a leader in being unwilling or unable to introduce a formal governance process long before this all went down or appoint a meaningful successor and step down amicably.”

The fundamental disagreement here is about who “owns” the GitHub organization that houses Bundler and RubyGems. Technically, Ruby Central was able to assert control because Hiroshi Shibata, a member of the Ruby core team and one of the contributors who has owner-level permissions on the GitHub, made Haught, who revoked the others’ access, an owner as well. Any owner can add or remove any other owner, but when Ruby Central’s board voted to make this change Haught acted immediately and removed Arko, Dash, and others. 

However, Arko fundamentally disagrees with the premise that Ruby Central has the right to govern the GitHub organization in any way, and believes that it has always belonged to the group of contributors who had access up until September 19.  

Arko said that even if Ruby Central gave him his permissions back, he would not consider the matter resolved until Ruby Central stopped claiming it owns Bundler “but I am definitely not going to hold my breath for that one.”

“When people really care, they're passionate and they're enthusiastic and they argue, and that often looks like drama,” McQuaid, the developer of Homebrew, said when I asked what he thinks this entire affair says about the state of open source development. “But if I had to pick between having the enthusiasm and the drama or losing both, then I'd probably pick the enthusiasm and the drama, because in some ways, the system is somewhat self correcting. Even the stuff that's going on right now, people are having essentially a very public debate about what role do large companies or nonprofits or individual maintainers have in open source. To what extent does someone's level of contribution matter versus what type of person they are? I think these are valuable discussions to be having, and we're having them in the open, whereas if it was in a company, this would all be in a meeting room or with an HR department or in a leadership offsite or whatever.”

Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers' mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising... We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don't implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren't supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it... We're now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can't let the same thing happen with AI. Berners-Lee also says "we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research," arguing that if we muster the political willpower, "we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. "We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It's not too late." Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When I arrived in the US, one of the first things I looked for was an Internet Cafe. I wanted to chat with my family and friends, read about my neighborhood and school, and keep up with the world I'd left behind. But there was one thing that always bothered me in these public spaces: the counter in the bottom right corner of the screen, counting down to let me know how much time I had left.

Today, that world has vanished. Internet access is widely available, and we don't need Internet Cafes anymore. The internet has become invisible, so seamlessly integrated into our lives that we forget how this whole system actually works. When you type a question into your phone, it feels like the entire transaction happens right there in your device. But that answer isn't a product of your phone; it emerges from an invisible ecosystem built on the generosity of countless people you'll never meet.

The Hidden Foundation

Imagine for a second that every time you visited a website, a tiny meter started ticking. Not for the content you're viewing, but for the very software the site runs on. A "Windows Server Tax" here, an "Oracle Database Fee" there. The vibrant, chaotic, creative web we know simply wouldn't exist. The number of blogs, small businesses, niche communities, and personal projects would shrink dramatically. The internet would become a sterile mall of well-funded corporations. (AOL?)

But that's not our reality. Instead, the internet runs on something we often overlook: radical, uncompensated generosity.

Most servers, cloud instances, and even Android phones run on Linux. Linux is freely given to the world. The software that delivers web pages to your browser? Apache and NGINX, both open source. Those AI-generated summaries you see in Google? They often draw from Wikipedia, edited and maintained by volunteers. OpenSSL, as its name suggests, is open source and protects your private data from prying eyes. When you're troubleshooting that coding problem at 2 AM, you're probably reading a blog post written by a developer who shared their solution simply to help others.

Free as in Freedom

This generosity isn't just about getting things for free, it's about freedom itself. When software is "free as in speech," it means you're not the product, your data isn't being harvested, and you have the liberty to use, study, modify, and share these tools. This is the essence of Linux, Wikipedia, and the core protocols that make the internet possible.

People contribute to these projects not primarily for money, but out of passion, the desire to build recognition, and the genuine wish to help others and contribute to the commons. It's a gift economy that creates abundance rather than scarcity.

The Multiplier Effect

This generous foundation is what allows the commercial web to flourish on top of it. A startup doesn't need to spend millions on operating system licenses before writing their first line of code. They can build on Linux, use MySQL for their database, and leverage countless other open-source tools, focusing their capital and energy on their unique idea. Building a website isn't a massive financial decision. It's a creative one. The barrier to entry is nearly zero, and that's a direct result of open-source generosity.

But this entire system rests on something even more fundamental: trust. When you visit my website, you trust me. You trust that the HTTPS lock icon means your data is safe, thanks to the open-source OpenSSL library. You trust that I'm not hosting malware. When you read a Wikipedia article, you trust (with healthy skepticism) that volunteers are aiming for accuracy, not pushing an agenda.

As a developer, I trust that the open-source tools I use are reliable and secure. I trust that the community will help me when I'm stuck. This trust is the currency that keeps the open web functioning. Obligatory Clay Shirky's video on Love, Internet Style.

Keeping the Engine Running

So what does this mean for you and me? We can continue this tradition of generosity that built the foundation we all rely on.

The next time you solve a tricky problem, consider writing a short blog post about it. Your generosity might save someone else hours of frustration. When Wikipedia helps you research that obscure topic, consider making a small donation. It's a tiny price for access to a library of Alexandria. If your company uses open-source software, consider contributing code back or sponsoring a developer. Help maintain the engine you depend on.

The internet is a miracle of collaboration, a testament to the idea that when we give freely, we don't deplete our resources. Instead, we create an ecosystem where everyone can build, learn, and connect. It runs on generosity. The least we can do is acknowledge it and, wherever possible, add our own contribution to the commons.