Let clear something up. I'm sorry but I reread yours 2 comments and you seemed to speak for the whole community (I quote: "..to a community...who are also adamantly opposed to the idea of selling snippets of code."). I talked to a lot of ruby dev and no one told me they were oppposed to my idea. What I'm saying here is that you do not represent the ruby community, you only speak for yourself and perhaps your dev friends.

However, there is perhaps a misunderstanding. I don't want to build the mirror of a paid version of rubygems.com. I simply use the gem workflow mechanism (which is robust and easy to use) in order to sell modules BUT in the context of a project (open source or not).

Besides, in php, there already are open source projects successfully working this way, I'm thinking about prestashop for instance. I also learned that some companies sells redhat and debian packages. Why not in ruby ?

One last thing, I'm not defensive but your first post was not constructive enough. You talked about a similar experience you had before (I quote: "... as experience has taught me that buying plugins for an open-source codebase is not an ideal solution for my customers"). Could you tell more about that ? That's the kind of answer I was expecting here. Thanks anyway :-)