Digging around, I found that the author used the JSON gem, relying on to_json taking an optional generator arg. But, yajl-ruby and ActiveSupport define to_json themselves without that, leading to breakage. Those, and the fix for his project[1], are all on GitHub.<p>The author claims most Ruby programmers are monkey-patching and causing these problems. That's almost right: they <i>were</i>. But by and large, they know better now, and would happily replace it with better code, if they could just find it and fix it: that's the real problem.<p>The author could help by, say, logging an issue, or forking and pull requesting a fix. I checked GitHub; his ID, bcoe, doesn't show in the issues, nor in the pull requests of yajl-ruby's GitHub page[2].<p>I'm not saying he <i>must</i> do this for every problem with every open-source project he happens across, but even one contribution helps more than this steam-venting blog post.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/bcoe/tire/commit/2dd5fc03" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bcoe/tire/commit/2dd5fc03</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/brianmario/yajl-ruby" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brianmario/yajl-ruby</a>