This all reminds me of the feelings after Merb was put down after pressure from Engine Yard so they could guard against their Ruby on Rails hosting business.
> But not everyone felt so good about it. I worked for Engine Yard, and we had made our mark selling Ruby on Rails deployment to large customers like Groupon, Kongregate and Github. I got hired at Engine Yard in part because the company's founders were worried that Rails wouldn't make it long-term. They wanted to hedge against this possibility.
> Unfortunately for me, waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy.
> I don't know everything that went on behind the scenes, but Engine Yard's management eventually asked me to consider merging with Rails. If I'm being honest, they pushed me to consider merging with Rails.
I'm sure there were other reasons for the merge as well, and I don't want to take anything away from Yehuda and the decision he made at the time, but I was a volunteer at the first MerbConf just a couple months before the "merge" and it all felt very sudden and at odds with the direction the project was headed. I had my cynical take that EY was behind the move, but those were just my personal feelings. Honestly it was refreshing to read Yehuda's story 12 years later as it helped put some of the pieces together as to why.