Replace Shopfiy with Microsoft, Oracle or etc and surely you can see what worries people might have around a move like this. Just because a company has a positive imago does not mean that their motives align with that of the community.

Microsoft and Oracle sold closed source software that had obtained tremendous leverage in their fields, if not outright monopolies. Historically, Microsoft and Oracle’s business models were threatened by open source. They have reacted in various ways over decades: alternately resisting, embracing, or acquiring control of important projects.

However, Shopify sells SAAS thst runs on open source. What does it benefit them to take over key aspects of infrastructure?

If they disliked what was happening with the OSS tools, they are big and rich enough to maintain forks or their own toolchain.

The OP seems to be associating the start of this controversy with some feud between DHH and the founder of Sidekiq. Shopify is indeed quite aligned with DHH. And there’s some controversy about so-called supply chain attacks, which I understand might inspire a call for a more locked-down organization. But as an outsider I am confused.

There’s a lack of transparency playing out compounded by a poor job rolling out would should be the equivalent of boring corporate security bureaucracy.

Usually when this kind of stuff is rolled out, it’s agreed upon in some form and documented. Then when people are surprised, it’s a matter of pointing to the section in the doc that’s relevant and everybody goes on their way.

From the outside it appears this had none of that, so people are understandably surprised, sad, or angry. Since there’s a lack of transparency, people are filling in the blanks.

Totally on that one. Recently investments in homebrew almost turned it to be a paid tool.

I can totally see someone seizing the opportunity there. (And if you think it is a good idea, you are a terrible person)

I work for a small company who helps financially for ruby community, and they strongly advocate for other same size companies to do the same so there is balance.

It would be terrible for pypi, rubygems, brew and other repos to be used as political or economical tools.

Large companies can fork and keep living for a while or pay the cost. But for everyone else, including people developing ideas at home, it would be a shot through the heart.

So if you have a company that can help those orgs, press them to do so. If you have 5 USD to help, also do it. It makes the difference.

> Recently investments in homebrew almost turned it to be a paid tool.

Can you say more about this? I haven't heard about this before.

I'm sure you can easily find a out its creator saying he cannot make a living from brew despite putting lots of effort in it. Initial plan was to bake some sort of payment in it so companies would need to pay, then it became something people would be for everyone and then, I guess, he finally decided that it would be too much stress to get people to accept the fact so he went to make Tea

For me, this means that brew will eventually phase out.

Aren't they a profit motivated company?

I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing. But it inevitably means they will not always be aligned.

Anon profit, or even a random person, has their own motivations too that will not be aligned. Linus was herding cats in the kernel back when few contributors were paid by corporations to do it. Anyone that has spent any time on a large-ish OSS project has seen bad maintainers with poor incentives, as seen from the outside

if there are contributors with various jobs it is very different than if the package is owned by a big for profit