When the news about the Merb/Rails merger broke, I shot off an email to Yehuda Katz (@wycats on Twitter) to get his take on things. Here's what he had to say:
In a way, this reminds me of the gcc/egcs merger back in the day. What kinds of benefits do you think the Rails and Merb communities will see from this merger?
Yehuda The benefit is that Rails becomes a framework that can scale from a single-file, light app, all the way up to a full stack (perhaps even more full stack than Rails is today!). That means that people who were having to struggle to gain acceptance for Merb at their work will be able to leverage Rails' popularity, while also being able to hold onto the reasons they wanted to use Merb in the first place. A win-win.
The Rails community will get all the benefits of Merb in their favorite framework. Faster performance, a public API (which means plugins that break less), the ability to use other ORMs, and the list goes on and on.
As a whole, the community gets more smart people working with each other instead of against each other. This should help grow Ruby even more. I am absolutely convinced that this is the year we put away the myths of Ruby's so-called inadequacies by scientifically disproving them one by one.
The competition for the top spot in the Ruby Web Framework space has been good for everyone. What's going to happen now that the two big fish represent one, even bigger, fish?
Yehuda The competition has yielded results! Merb has proven out a bunch of ideas that the Rails core team now wholeheartedly embraces. That's only a win-win for everyone. Now that Rails will become more like Merb, it'd be great if another framework, representing a different community with different interests did exactly the same thing. Forcing Rails to acknowledge the needs of a community of people by proving those ideas out in code worked here, and it will work again.
Where else in Rubyspace do you think this kind of merger would be possible and helpful?
Yehuda The proliferation of rspec-like frameworks has gotten a little bit out of control. I'd love to see some combined efforts there. Dave Chelimsky, who runs rspec, has said over and over that he's in favor of cleaning up the core, which seems to be the big objection that people have that causes them to go make yet another speccing kit.
Hopefully future successes here will show people that it's possible to put aside differences and build something great!
I also asked Kevin Clark (@kevinclark on Twitter) for his take on the merger
Kevin I think the Rails/Merb merger has potential to be good and bad for the community. A single API for a unified set of tools and plugins is a good thing, clearly, and makes it more attractive to develop software in and (maybe more interestingly) for the Ruby web space. I feel Merb got a lot of things right when reconsidering how a web framework should be built, and Rails will benefit from that. Merb at the same time is going to be wrapped up into the Rails ecosystem that's churning out documentation and libraries at a sometimes dizzying pace. A bigger community will help smooth the edges that are still sometimes rough around Merb development.
The big thing that worries me is the competition aspect of the merger. Yes, sometimes the rivalry was silly and overly dramatic, but each group pushed the other to improve and pay attention to alternate lines of though and provide something better. I hope that discourse continues publicly. The worst thing to come of this would be that debates that formerly happened in the open, and produced new insights in the open, are hidden away in rails core.
One thing to consider is that this is exactly the sort of behavior Dave Thomas encouraged in his keynote at RubyConf. If we look at Merb as an experimental fork of rails (yes, this is horridly simplified) that gained popularity and was eventually folded back into the mainline, it exemplifies what Dave thinks we need to start doing with Ruby. So, I'd encourage more forking rather than merging. Even smaller libraries benefit. Just look at the Nokogiri/Hpricot arms race.
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