The other day there was some discussion about how some information on the Ruby home page is out of date or incomplete, so I guess this is a response to that. Well, good, you can't have too many "home" pages for a programming language. This should make things much less confusing for newcomers.
A collaboration with the maintainers of the original site is likely to inherit its problems. Creating a new site is much easier than trying to modify people's behavior. The duplication of effort is not a significant issue for a project of this scale.
A similar thing happened with Rubyforge -> Gemcutter. It was a pretty fast and clean transition. This is really how the Ruby community rolls. The "official" whatever is whoever is doing the best job of it at the moment.
Ruby is going the way of Java and for the same reasons. Rails originally made easy things easy and hard things possible. Now, for novices, easy things are harder. Java went the same route largely as a result of the debacle know as J2EE.
Java suffered the problems that it did because there was the "one true way" of J2EE until Spring eventually came along and made it (marginally) better.
Merb provided that for Rails. Now there's no more Merb.
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The point: we, the Ruby community, are suffering our own success. Popularity leads to people leads to bureaucracy leads to mediocrity. See "JSF".
As a result, this "fork" makes sense to me. Unfortunately, it's just a drop in the bucket. Ruby.next is coming and it's called Javascript (by way of Node) and Clojure (by way of those Rubyists who are LISP obsessed and still use Java).
The point: we, the Ruby community, are suffering our own success. Popularity leads to people leads to bureaucracy leads to mediocrity. See "JSF".
Isn't this (rubylang.info) a great example of lack of bureaucracy? Someone isn't satisfied with the current ruby-lang.org, so instead of trying to go through lots of bureaucracy, they rather make something completely new?
The current bureaucracy is flawed. It is not community owned but government by a "core maintainer" group where decisions are not publicize nor is there a roadmap anywhere.
I went through the necessary communication channels BEFORE I started this and what I experienced from that is the result of rubylang.info.
