The installation process would be much easier if there were only a minimal number of gems to be installed, preferably none. Motiro's tarball could easily include many of the gems it depends on, like it includes Rails. Most gems are MIT-licensed and could be freely redistributed. Some of them may present technical issues regarding platform-dependency, like sqlite3-ruby.

The database generation step could also be removed from the installation by distributing a pre-generated empty database within the tarball. People wanting to update from one version to another should not risk loosing their data. Maybe there should be automatic update support.

The tarball distribution needs to be made consistent with the gem approach. The gem should not include other code available as gems.