I said in the post that HSBT who was a maintainer invited Marty as an owner of the GitHub account. This was against the wishes of the other maintainers who had established practices for adding new maintainers.

So HSBT was the owner? And transfered ownership?

HSBT was a maintainer who had "owner" permissions on GitHub.

It would seem that HSBT being a maintainer owner AND shopify employee faced a significant conflict of interest. Also I don’t think it’s a stretch given the context and clear direction coming from shopify for the actions of others to assume that HSBT themselves were directed by their employer to add Marty as an owner.

I sense there’s legal grounds here but can’t fully articulate what the legal case would be.

hsbt (no caps) isn’t a Shopify employee.

He’s one of the most active Japanese Ruby core committer, employed by ANPAD, and also part time contractor for Ruby Central, and one of the most active committers to rubygems/bundler.

BTW, ANPAD inc is a construction company, the site is in japanese but the opening movie alone gives a good idea of the context they operate in:

https://andpad.co.jp/

It's funny how far removed it is to all of this drama.

That is explained in the "On 9 September, HSBT ..." paragraph, which describes how an existing RubyGems maintainer did - and then undid (most) - changes. A new user remained as an owner of the RubyGems GitHub organization - which allowed Ruby Central to do things later.

It looks like all these Ruby package maintainers decided to, for the sake of convenience perhaps, keep their primary repos under a single 'Ruby Gems' GitHub org. That's what allowed Ruby Central to kick them out and take control of all the repos.

It sounds like RubyGems was renamed to Ruby Central.

At the GitHub Enterprise level, you can see that reflected if you look at any of the users profiles https://github.com/mghaught