So, I posted this on one of the threads for other blog posts about this, but that tread doesn't have much going on, and I want to see what people have to say about it:<p>I'm a merbist and think this will be good for both the Merb and Rails communities.<p>That said, I'm a little afraid it will shaft the other Ruby frameworks (Sinatra, Camping) and possibly straight ruby too. People might make interesting things only compatible with Rails.<p>When Merb was a pretty big, active minority, it was more compelling to go out of one's way to make interesting libraries (ORMs, gems, etc.) easily compatible with anything ruby.<p>Now, people might at the least write things specifically setup for use w/ rails in such a way that it's inconvenient to nonrails ruby, and at worst make Rails plugins for things that could be useful libraries for all of Ruby.<p>Rails is gaining modularity, but I fear Ruby overall might lose it. Even after Rails and Merb merge, rails!=ruby.