You probably have heard that Rails and Merb [will] Merge.
According to the Rails and Merb blogs, both teams agreed, and that’s that. But in other industries, things aren’t so simple. If Google and Yahoo wanted to merge, the antitrust authorities would want to get involved.
But in the open source community, we don’t have antitrust regulators. But what if we did? It might have been fun if the Ruby community had the ability to approve or deny the merger. In doing, the Ruby “oversight committee” might ask this question: is a merger or competition better for Ruby Web developers? What does “better” mean? The criteria that come to my mind are: performance, modularity, innovation, interoperability, source code readability, adoption (open source projects require a certain level of adoption to be sustainable), and efficiency (are the community resources being used effectively, or are they being split between projects that are very similar).
I’ve leave the full analysis as an exercise to the reader. 
2 Comments
I would approve this merger. The reality is that Merb and ActionPack (the part of Rails that Merb is a replacement for) just aren’t that different. I’d rather have developers working better to improve the framework.
Whoops, meant to say “developers working together”
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