Ruby Central started in 2001. I was one of the early Board members, along with Chad Fowler and David Alan Black. We put on every Ruby conference until Ruby became more popular to support multiple conferences. We started coding RubyGems (although the name originated in 2001 at the first RubyConf in Florida) in 2003 at the RubyConf in Austin TX. We sat around a table the first night with a CVS repo on a USB drive and passed it around and committed code until we had a functioning gem command. I demoed it in my talk the next day with the first "gem install". Gem versioning, gemspec, gem command, gem server were all built that first night. Obviously tons of changes since then!

I don't have a dog in this fight, but the discussion is about the phrase "hostile entity", not about a loss of trust.