It seems that we thoroughly caught the interwebs with surprise by announcing that Merb is being merged into Rails 3. 96% of the feedback seems to be very positive. People incredibly excited about us closing the rift and emerging as a stronger community.
But I wanted to take a few minutes to address some concerns of the last 4%. The people who feel like this might not be such a good idea. And in particular, the people who feel like it might not be such a good idea because of various things that I've said or done over the years.
There's absolutely no pleasing everyone. You can't and shouldn't try to make everyone love you. The best you can do is make sure that they're hating you for the right reasons. So let's go through some of the reasons that at least in my mind are no longer valid.
DHH != Rails
I've been working on Rails for more than five years. Obviously I've poured much of my soul, talent, and dedication into this. And for the first formative years, I saw it as my outmost duty to ensure the integrity of that vision by ruling with a comparably hard hand. Nobody had keys to the repository but me for the first year or so.
But I don't need to do that anymore — and haven't for a long time. The cultural impact of what is good Rails has spread far and wide and touched lots of programmers. These programmers share a similar weltanschauung, but they don't need to care only about the things that I care about. In fact, the system works much better if they care about different things than I do.
My core philosophy about open source is that we should all be working on the things that we personally use and care about. Working for other people is just too hard and the quality of the work will reflect that. But if we all work on the things we care about and then share those solutions between us, the world gets richer much faster.
Defaults with choice
So let's take a concrete example. Rails ships with a bunch of defaults. For the ORM, you get Active Record. For JavaScript, you get Prototype. For templating, you get ERb/Builder. And so on and so forth. Rails 3 will use the same defaults.
I personally use all of those default choices, so do many other Rails programmers. The vanilla ride is a great one and it'll remain a great one. But that doesn't mean it has to be the only one. There are lots of reasons why someone might want to use Data Mapper or Sequel instead of Active Record. I won't think of them any less because they do. In fact, I believe Rails should have open arms to such alternatives.
This is all about working on what you use and sharing the rest. Just because you use jQuery and not Prototype, doesn't mean that we can't work together to improve the Rails Ajax helpers. By allowing Rails to bend to alternative drop-ins where appropriate, we can embrace a much larger community for the good of all.
In other words, just because you like reggae and I like Swedish pop music doesn't mean we can't bake a cake together. Even suits and punk rockers can have a good time together if they decide to.
Sharing the same sensibilities
I think what really brought this change around was the realization that we largely share the same sensibilities about code. That we're all fundamentally Rubyists with very similar views about the big picture. That the rift in many ways was a false one. Founded on lack of communication and a mistaken notion that because we care about working on different things, we must somehow be in opposition.
But talking to Yehuda, Matt, Ezra, Carl, Daniel, and Michael, I learned — as did we all — that there are no real blockbuster oppositions. They had been working on things that they cared about which to most extends were entirely complimentary to what Jeremy, Michael, Rick, Pratik, Josh, and I had been working on from the Rails core.
Once we realized that, it seemed rather silly to continue the phantom drama. While there's undoubtedly a deep-founded need for humans to see and pursue conflict, there are much bigger and more worthwhile targets to chase together rather than amongst ourselves. Yes, I'm looking at you J2EE, .NET, and PHP :D.
So kumbaja motherfuckers and merry christmas!