Bringing together online sects... Rails and Merb merge

"We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more productive than duplicating things on each side of the fence. Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that."

David Heinemeier Hansson has this evening posted a remarkable missive about the merging of Rails and Merb, two independent but parallel frameworks within the Ruby community.

While the merger itself is huge news for anyone who works with Ruby, Rails or Merb, the letter and the merger are also of broader interest to anyone who follows online communities. In the face of a broad trend of fragmentation, division, and overall entropy within special-interest online communities, the friendly (and, potentially, massively productive) merger of two relatively healthy collaborative programs is worthy of note.

When corporations merge, one of the reasons they always cite is the cost savings from eliminating redundant infrastructure and employees ("synergies") despite the fact that they are seldom realized. Conversely, for volunteer or open-source efforts, this effect is too often overlooked entirely - creating situations like what used to exist between Rails and Merb, where two essentially similar communities were building very similar products in parallel, for a similar user base, and in the process duplicating a lot of effort that in reality was of little consequence to their respective constituencies. By agreeing to "unbranch" these two technology platforms (I use quotes because they did not, in fact, arise from the same original code base), these teams have the opportunity to spend a greater portion of their time on work that really matters rather to their user base. And that is a good think (TM) for everyone.

There's another parallel this brings to mind: real world churches have traditionally fractured, split, grown or withered, but almost never merged. It's not easy, but there are good reasons to do it if you're able to be flexible. (Unfortunately, churches don't generally have "flexibilty" high on their list of traits.) In the process, a lot of good community work and effort goes to waste, because either a church keeps growing, or it gradually withers away and disappears. Open-source projects have traditionally suffered similar fates. Hopefully, intelligent, thoughtful mergings of communities, not just technologies, like the Rails/Merb merge, will be the future trend.

Updated: David has written more about the situation, talking about it at a more conceptual level.