I read the article differently than most of you. I think Zed is still grumpy that contributing a big piece (if not irreplaceable, but unarguably useful) of the

I read the article differently than most of you. I think Zed is still grumpy that contributing a big piece (if not irreplaceable, but unarguably useful) of the rails stack didn't lead to more recognition and, more importantly, the type of recognition that's useful when it's time to pay the rent. Hence his rails is a ghetto post -- I read it as something like, "This rails shit has worked out well for DHH but a bunch of other people have contributed and we haven't gotten shit. This sucks." This post is an elaboration -- having written a bunch of big projects that are freely available for anyone who wants to to review the code, Zed still has to answer the usual weeder questions. It's kind of insulting, frankly. And from his perspective, his contributions to open source and the community at large haven't done that much for him. I think this is part of a general problem in programming that a blog author I follow pointed out and another poster in this thread mentioned: open source has worked out well for eg Larry Wall or Linus or DHH, etc. But there are a lot of people that contribute -- maybe not as main authors, but who eg make sure all your rails db gems work with new revs of the databases and contribute lots of little pieces -- but who don't get enough out of it to financially justify the contribution. See the creator of Clojure essentially begging for donations on his website in order to continue development. Sometimes, it comes down to the simple fact that open source contributions might be fun or useful or intellectually gratifying, but they don't pay the bills. The industry as a whole, IMO, needs more ways to channel money to the masses of OS contributors who aren't famous and aren't paid to do it, but who make lots of contributions. links I mentioned: http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/commercial-grails-plugins/ http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/commercial-grails-plu... and http://www.anyware.co.uk/2005/2009/12/11/do-we-need-a-commercial-market-for-grails-plugins/ http://www.anyware.co.uk/2005/2009/12/11/do-we-need-a-commer...