I entirely disagree. As most all open source projects, Ruby has a set of core contributors, but is clearly open to community contribution, as can be seen from their Git repo's history (https://github.com/ruby/ruby/network). And no, core communication and decisions are NOT opaque to outsiders, as is the usual case with most open source software (Google groups, mailing lists, IRC channels, etc). And lastly, language features and design is a product of the RubySpec, which is itself a Git repo for people to contribute to possible language design/syntax/core libraries for Ruby VM implementors to introduce (https://github.com/rubyspec/rubyspec/).