Why I’m not signing the “Plan Vert” (DHH) letter
There’s a new open letter to the Rails Core team and the wider Ruby community, asking them to create a Rails fork that excludes DHH.
I think this letter is probably well intentioned and I understand why people are signing it.
DHH has been boiling the frog over the last few years, sharing ever more extreme right-wing views. I find many of the things he says to be not just dangerous and abhorrent, but also poorly reasoned and contradictory.
Take, for example, his recent post about how ‘Britain should be for the Brits.’ At the end of the first paragraph, he says of Britain, “I thought I might move there one day.” Now excuse me if I’ve got this wrong, but I didn’t think DHH was British.
There are countless examples of his inconsistent reasoning. The funniest of which is the contrast between his response when WordPress.org hijacked the Advanced Custom Fields plugin and when Ruby Central hijacked the Bundler gem.
About WordPress.org he said, “This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it. We’re in uncharted and dangerous territory for open source now. What a sad sight.”1
Not a year later when the operators of the RubyGems.org Service did expropriate an official Gem, handing over control to a new team, locking the core team out he said, “Ruby Central is making the right moves to ensure the Ruby supply chain is beyond reproach both technically and organizationally.”2
This is a man with big opinions and little thought.
But back to the letter. The letter calls upon the Rails Core team specifically but also the wider Ruby community to cut ties with DHH, hard-fork Rails and adopt a modern Code of Conduct.
There’s nothing wrong with voicing your opinion that the Rails Core team should do this. But it is blatantly not going to work.
First, everyone on the Rails core team got there ultimately because DHH wanted them there. And everyone who doesn’t feel comfortable working with him has already left. He’s been saying offensive things for years and years.
Secondly, asking other people to fork a gem is lazy. You don’t need to make threats to fork and open source project. You can just do it.
The problem is with a gem the size of Rails, you need a critical mass from day one. Rails likely costs well over $10M each year to maintain. It’s incredibly complex and large.
The only way you could ever pull this off would be if the entire Rails Core team plus thousands of other developers and companies all switched to the fork immediately, which as we already discussed isn’t going to happen.
So this is not the solution. This is just theatre.
If you really want a full-stack Ruby framework that doesn’t have a bigot with poor reasoning skills in charge, you need to make one. And to succeed, it needs to be better than Rails in every way.
It needs to win the hearts and minds of the Ruby community and beyond that, it needs to be so damn good that people learn Ruby just to use the framework.