What They Really Hate David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) for

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 24, 2025

Nothing to do with code

Is it jealousy? Are they jealous of him? Envy is always bad.

Is it because he's vain? Because he is outspoken?

Whatever it is, the man decided to dump formerly beloved and admired Apple things... and move to GNU/Linux [1]. He also decided to develop GNU/Linux, or integrate bits of pieces to make a distro many now use and boast about, even in Geminispace [2].

"The Best Tiling Window Setup Ever?" [3]

So what's the issue?

Perceived political views? He recently complained about how Mozilla's Eich got 'cancelled' (shortly after he had become CEO), so now he's getting that same treatment himself.

Is this connected to what seems like a coup coordinated around Microsoft's GitHub [4,5]? It is basically Microsoft-controlled social control media with Microsoft censors.

What else can it be?

Internal politics in Ruby and RoR (or projects written with these)? Hard to tell without being a hardcore developer in that microcosm, but it seems [6,7] like ruinous infighting. And this cannot end well. They seem to be ignoring the issues that really matter to interject unrelated ideologies.

Every company that has many people will fail to recruit people's whose politics align perfectly, yet such companies can continue to operate.

With that in mind ("something is happening against Ruby," as someone put it), let's hope they don't let the "cancel culture" politics (which people on the right do as well; they are hypocrites) seed chaos and ruin. We saw what it did to Freenode back in 2021. Freenode used to be a platform for everybody before some people decided to split it along political spheres. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. What Is Omarchy Linux, and Why Is 37signals Moving to It?

   So what is it? Omarchy Linux is an opinionated configuration of Arch Linux combined with the Hyprland tiling window compositor. It’s designed to deliver a turnkey, modern development environment with elegant defaults and a strong UX focus. It was created by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), 37signals CTO and best known as the creator of Ruby on Rails.

2. 🖥 Omarchy Linux

   I’ve been using Fedora (KDE Spin, natch) since getting the Framework 13, and it’s been rock solid. I was never a fan of Umbongo’s snap bullshit, and Flatpaks do what they say on the tin, so I’ve been able to get hold of pretty much everything that I’ve ever wanted. No complaints. But I got nerd-sniped... between the eyes.

   I listened to Lex Friedman’s podcast, with DHH, of Ruby On Rails fame. He’s an interesting guy; Amigan, demoscener, and very Scandinavian. I’m sure I’d enjoy chatting to him over a pint. Part of the conversation discussed his fall-out with Apple, and how he was moving over to Linux, which I didn’t think much of it at the time. We all get there eventually.

3. 2025-08-10 [Older] Omarchy - The Best Tiling Window Setup Ever?

4. RubyGems maintainer quits after Ruby Central takes control

   RubyGems is the standard package manager for Ruby and is sponsored by Ruby Central, a nonprofit that runs events including RubyConf and the discontinued RailsConf, and sponsors critical tools. These tools include RubyGems and Bundler, the latter being a dependency manager that ensures the gems (ruby packages) required by an application are installed with the correct versions.

5. Open Source Turmoil: RubyGems Maintainers Kicked Off GitHub

   “By doing this, he took control for himself and other full-time employees of Ruby Central,” Dash wrote in a goodbye to RubyGems post shared on social media. “Later that day, after refusing to restore GitHub permissions, Ruby Central further revoked access to the bundler and rubygems-update gems on RubyGems.org.

   “I will not mince words here: This was a hostile takeover.”

6. The DHH Problem

   Back in 2014, Tom Stuart delivered a pithy yet salient lightning talk at the Scottish Ruby Conference titled The DHH Problem, in which he succinctly describes the character of David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails. I recommend watching it because, in just three and a half minutes, he effectively provides context on who DHH was, who he still is, and why his future shift to the right would make so much sense and be so unsurprising. But, if you’d rather not, I’ll include a transcript below: [...]

7. The Ruby community doesn’t have a DHH problem

   A response to another blog post that states that the Ruby community as a DHH problem. If we look at every individual claim, it's obvious that it doesn't.