I feel like a change to the way gems are distributed/downloaded could fix this. Unfortunately, the very powers that could make that happen are the powers that control the software and infrastructure, and have the least incentive to improve things.
I honestly find it ridiculous that this situation happened to begin with, and I also have no clue why people are hating on DHH.
The easiest way to kill an open source project is drama and forking like this. Ruby has been around forever, obviously, however it is far from the most used languages, and drama like this just hurts the ecosystem as a whole.
Drama and forking aren't going to kill Ruby. This is a move like the one from Freenode to LiberaChat: hostile entities take over $thing, sensible people move on to $newthing, the new normal settles around $newthing.
Silencing and excluding such people from open source is the right thing to do because failure to do so means forcing others to interact with people who are hostile to their very existence.
I honestly find it ridiculous that this situation happened to begin with, and I also have no clue why people are hating on DHH.
The easiest way to kill an open source project is drama and forking like this. Ruby has been around forever, obviously, however it is far from the most used languages, and drama like this just hurts the ecosystem as a whole.
As a former Ruby dev, it makes me sad.