Here's my attempt to explain the situation in a brief way. DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, wrote some things which are considered racist by some people. This caused a prominent Ruby programmer to withdraw his large sponsorship of Ruby Central, a non-profit which organises Ruby conferences, because DHH spoke at one of their conferences. Therefore Ruby Central ended up very dependent on Shopify, a large company, for funding. One theory (mentioned in the article) is that Shopify (where DHH is a board member) then pressured Ruby Central to perform a "hostile takeover" of the RubyGems GitHub organisation, where they revoked the maintainer privileges of long-time contributors. What is RubyGems? It's a website which is the de facto standard source for "gems", which are Ruby packages. I guess this is equivalent to NPM in the Node/JavaScript world.
If you want to know the potentially racist stuff said by DHH, he essentially seemed to be unhappy that London is "no longer full of native Brits". He says "native Brits" now make up "about a third" of London. So by "native Brits" he seems to mean the White British ethnic group, because they made up 37% of London in the 2021 census.
The Ruby programmer who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: "I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak. We cannot tolerate hateful people as leaders in our communities."
The "hostile takeover" of RubyGems has led some Ruby programmers to create an alternative to the RubyGems website. This alternative is gem.coop. Also there is an open letter signed by influential Ruby programmers which calls for Ruby on Rails to be forked so that DHH no longer has an association with it.
The article that this post links to is an update to the situation: Ruby Central is now taking steps to try and cool the controversy.
Thoughts on this?
Edit: fixed typo.
Is it okay for DHH to express his unhappiness that London is no longer mostly White British? He said "I thought I might move there one day... Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits."
Let's say a lot of white people move to a previously black area. This causes a prominent person to write a blog saying "I thought I might move there one day... Now, I wouldn't dream of it. It's no longer the place I was infatuated with. Chiefly because it's no longer full of black residents." That would be racist wouldn't it?
Yes, it is ok. Different people have different tastes in cultural, social, etc neighborhoods. This guy prefers classical British culture. See no wrong here.
He doesn't seem to be talking about culture. He didn't say something like "London has fewer pubs than it used to". Instead he seems to be referring specifically to ethnicity. His interest in London seems to be reduced because more non-white people now live in London.
^ mental gymnastics olympian trying to defend overt racism with word salad.