Ruby Together - Ruby Language Development Foundation

Having slipped a couple of times in the conditional Ruby Weekly, the site of the initiative Ruby Together did not catch my attention, although it should have been. Let's see what we are offered to spend our dollar of labor.

Ruby Together is a non-profit organization engaged in raising and distributing money for the development of the infrastructure of the Ruby language. Already, under the wing of the organization are the pillars of the Ruby ecosystem: the bundle gem, the rubygems.org repository , and the rubygems project itself . The organization is managed by a board of directors , which consists of well-known names for all rubists: André Arko, Aaron Patterson ( interview for habr ), Steve Klabnik ( interview for habr , “How do I find time?” ), Sarah Mei, Terence Lee, Ines Sombra, Joel Watson.
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Individual membership in the organization costs $ 40 per month, corporate membership - $ 800. Contributions give the right to vote and a number of bonuses, which are under the cut. For those who just want to help the project with money, there is the status of a “friend”, without access to internal resources and the right to vote, with a monthly fee of $ 10, or a one-time fee of an arbitrary amount. To date, Stripe and Engine Yard have joined the project, as well as more than 30 individual participants.

Take part .

Current tasks

The team already has specific proposals on how and where to send the fund's money. I must admit, the list of plans is very inspiring.

New RubyGems Index Format

Read in detail about the new index here:

• github.com/bundler/new-index
• blog.engineyard.com/2014/new-rubygems-index-format
• andre.arko.net/2014/03/28/the-new-rubygems-index-format
• confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2013-extreme-makeover-rubygems-edition

Optimization API for resolving dependencies

Now quite often there are situations when, for various reasons, the API responds to your bundle install with long delays. This problem is planned to be eliminated by optimizing the API for heavy loads.

Local cache server for gems

The new index format will greatly simplify local work with the cache of gems. This will make it possible to develop an easy-to-configure cache server that any team of rubists can raise for their own needs.

The Update Framework

RubyGems.org has experienced serious security problems several times in recent years. The Ruby Together team plans to implement the Update Framework specification for RubyGems.org, which will protect the repository from attacks of a certain spectrum. Specifications for several years. There are implementations for python and go. Exhaustive information is on the website:

• theupdateframework.com

Vulnerability Notification Engine

Unfortunately, now everyone knows about vulnerabilities in gems in their own way. Who is from the New Relic interface, who is from the mailings, who is from the Khomakov blog, and some are not at all interested in what is happening. The existence of a single mechanism would greatly help the community.

Other improvements

• Unified dependency resolution for Bundler / RubyGems / CocoaPods.
• Release Bundler 2.0.
• Plugin system for Bundler.
• Collection of statistics on the use of RubyGems, its analysis and display.
• Alert to existing threats when installing vulnerable gems.

What does membership in Ruby Together give?

If the money from the contributions will be implemented at least part of what was said above - this is already an excellent investment. But, of course, there is an additional profit:

• Your name will be mentioned on the project page.
• You will get an invite to the Slack chat team. Corporate fee gives up to five invites.
• You get access to all current and future Ruby Together projects.
• The company logo will be included in the presentations of all project participants at their public speeches.
• You get the opportunity to vote in the annual election to the “board of directors”.

The idea of ​​such an initiative is not new, remember the same gittip (now Gratipay), which works on similar mechanisms (and supports some projects from the same sandbox). If you look at the current statistics , you can see quite a serious infusion. Thus, in almost three years of its existence, the project scored 2,881 (out of more than 39,000 participants) an active participant, passing through $ 157,805.

But in my opinion, the mechanism of Ruby Together looks much more mature and can bring much more benefit to the community. The money here will be used to solve specific tasks, which can confidently be called priority, while Gratipay works on the personal sympathy of users for individual programmers or projects, without at the same time declaring goals and controlling their implementation.

We should not forget about the rubists' vanity, as well as about the direct benefit of companies from corporate contributions: Gratipay does not offer a corporate subscription and does not conduct Hall of Fame, depersonalizing all payments.