Pivotal Labs doesn't work for free. If you go to Pivotal's front page, what they do is pretty much do all the coding for a startup. They take a business person'

Pivotal Labs doesn't work for free. If you go to Pivotal's front page, what they do is pretty much do all the coding for a startup. They take a business person's ideas and then code them up and implement them. From there they then teach the business people either how to maintain it or how to hire a dev team that can (or work with the dev team they've hired to learn how to work with the codebase). Its just what pivotal does for a living, so my logical conclusion was that Diaspora was using Pivotal for code, and their comments on their blog were filtered to with PR speak.