Ruby Central has been the entity responsible for the infrastructure hosting rubygems.org the entire time. Literally since the beginning of rubygems.org. Any hosting bills, contracts, or agreements are in the name of the Ruby Central corporation and always have been, as far as I know. Any "previous maintainers" were working as contractors or employees of Ruby Central, if they were working on infrastructure.

The (open source) source code for rubygems and bundler, the libraries that rubyists use in their apps to manage gem dependencies, are potentially another story.

But the infrastructure, to have passwords to it, for rubygems.org, has been Ruby Central since the beginning of rubygems.org without any break. I don't know why people receiving checks from Ruby Central as contractors would think they had a personal right above Ruby Central to the infrastructure that Ruby Central has been running since long before they received those checks. Them thinking they did is sketchy.

Again, the open source source code, I agree, is another matter with other considerations. It has had many maintainers and contributors over time, including periods where development was not coordinated by Ruby Central. And all the code is owned by it's authors, and licensed MIT-style. But you're talking about passwords to infrastructure...

Genuine question: how do you take something which you have already been paying for?

They removed other maintainers access to their AWS account, and one of them had allegedly taken a screenshot of the root password from a password manager and logged in a few hours later and changed the root password to lock the legal owners out. Most of the community has turned on the maintainer who did that, it was extremely childish behaviour.