At my company we've open sourced a ruby gem for an elastic search client but kept the rails integration closed for some of the same reasons. I just don't have time to write a version that runs with vanilla rails. Our gem relies on a bunch of conventions and libs that are not standard for a rails app. Sure we could extract it, but we would have to rewrite parts that depend on other tools. Sure they could be open sourced as well, but we've hardly got the time to do that. The reality is that most oss projects are small and are maintained by one person with occasional patches from others. Without that one person most die.