Feel free to play the video below for dramatic effect while reading this post.

So if you’re in any way connected to the Ruby development community, you’ve heard about the sudden departure of the enigmatic and eccentric _why from the whole of the internet, deleting his web sites, code repositories, and other works overnight. Especially among my esteemed colleagues in the local Ruby community (pride of Mongolia!), there’s been a heated moral debate over his actions. Should we should consider _why a self-centered ass for taking his ball (meaning source code of course - like programmers know what a ball is…) and going home? Should we simply be grateful for the time we had with _why?

On that question I am mostly ambivalent, since when you get something for nothing it is difficult to criticize the means in which it is provided. Was it kind of dick move to abruptly can several popular open source projects and resources with no warning? Yes. Were we lucky to have _why’s code, writings, and other works at all? Yes. Both points of view are in my mind totally valid.

What the whole situation highlights is the fluid, alpha status of so many Ruby open source projects. Take a look at your Rails project today - how many gems do you depend on that are on version 0.x? How many gems or plugins that you depend on have a single maintainer? My guess is that between both questions, the answer is at least one or two. This is probably due in large part to the simple fact that Ruby and Rails are experiencing a relatively recent surge in popularity, and for that reason many derivative works are also young. In time, I would expect that much of the fragmentation and confusion in the Ruby open source community will dissipate - in fact, that process has already begun.

In any event, _why’s disappearance serves as a cautionary tale that any developer working with open source (especially Ruby) needs to be aware of, myself included. Maturity and community are important considerations when deciding what code goes into your project, because tomorrow _why, Jamis Buck, or mislav might not be there to do your work for free.