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There's no law for many things in this world, but there certainly are expectations.

There are many projects with widespread use that have become core projects in the Ruby community (Rails, bundler, RVM, etc). It's reasonable to expect that issues or design decisions get discussed on the project mailing list before you try and divide the community.

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It's at least no more divisive than to have Passenger vs Thin vs Unicorn vs Heroku vs WEBrick vs Pow for the serving end of things. Or RSpec vs Test::Unit vs MiniTest vs Shoulda vs Riot for testing. Good things have come out of all of these additions and they were not all fuelled by discussions.

In any case, to defend against claims like yours (which are common, it seems), it does seem wise for anyone wishing to create something new to post to existing mailing lists with their ideas. Once the maintainers say "No" to your idea to rip out 90% of their system, you can then create your new project and have the valuable mailing list link to say "Look, I tried."

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