Another signatory

[jgarber]

Though I'm afraid that we won't be able to pull it off, I have to go on record repudiating DHH's dangerous, abhorrent, poorly reasoned, and contradictory views and call out the impact his prominence has on the rest of us. Rails has shaped my career and given me joy for the last twenty years, but I fear the rot will eat away at what was once so sweet and drive away community members whose presence I cherish.

Creating a separation between DHH and Rails has real costs--maybe devastating to the future prospects of Rails--so we must ask ourselves:

1. Is DHH using his Rails success and fame as a platform to spread his ideological views?

• I’m sure he thinks he’s just a person on the internet who has thoughts, sometimes about software, sometimes about gender or national identity. If he weren’t the creator and figurehead of Rails, he’d be just another tech founder who got rich and veered to the right. People could read his blog or not, subscribe to Basecamp or not; buy his books or not; care about fast cars or not.
• But he isn't just another tech bro or internet person with an opinion. He's trading on the association with Rails to spread his ideology—expecting people will come to his blog for a vision of the future of web development and click through to his increasingly fascist rants.
• The association goes both ways. He wants his views to get airtime or he wouldn't post them in the same place. The stronger they get, the more they cast a shadow on the whole Rails ecosystem and everyone in it.

2. Is this situation dire enough to be actionable?

• If not now, how much more extreme would he have to get to sully all the hard work you’ve put into practicing Rails, the blog posts you wrote, the PRs you submitted, the gems you’ve made, and the conferences and meetups you’ve attended?
• If Rails becomes associated with fascism, what will be the impact on your career? What are the retooling costs, the opportunity cost of your time between now and then?
• Can you foresee a day where you have to explain the chronology of your Rails experience vis-à-vis “when DHH went crazy?” Or is that canary already dead?

3. Is he capable of taking responsibility for the damage he's causing?

• If we asked DHH to separate his Rails content from his ideological content, do you think he would?
• If he said FU to that idea, what does that say about his concern for this community--for all the people that took a chance on Rails, fixed bugs, released gems, and helped make it a success? Money sloshes around in this business, but time and attention are finite resources each of us are endowed equally.
• Would he see it that way--that he started the fire but thousands of people from all walks of life added their fuel? Or would he say, "I built this, not you. I pulled you 'out of the caves and the darkness into the light.'" 😬 We owe our success to what he started, but does he owe us anything?

4. Is he the sole source of all that's good in Rails?

• If DHH voluntarily retired from Rails right now, would the framework have a future? Would we all just shuffle off and say, "Time to learn some C#"? "I guess I'll make my next app in NestJS"
• What's exciting in the world of Ruby? Who do you want to hear speak at the next conference? Who are the people who make you feel part of the community?

If we do nothing, the outcome is entirely in his hands. If we stand up against it and build new power structures that serve us, we have a hope of saving this beautiful community.

Note

This is not a duplicate signature with #56. We know each other and joke about the namespace collision. I'm delighted that he signed first!

[jgarber623]

👋🏻 Hey, buddy!