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Zed Shaw's code is insignificant in the face of the contribution of many, many far more talented open source developers who are far less accomplished at leverag

Zed Shaw's code is insignificant in the face of the contribution of many, many far more talented open source developers who are far less accomplished at leveraging controversy to drive traffic and attention. The mileage that Zed Shaw has received on a simple well-designed Python SMTP library is absolutely astounding and totally disproportionate to the complexity, novelty, and general market need for the library. His only other notable contribution is a simple, feature-constrained single-purpose micro web server that uses a scaling-limited thread-per-request architecture.

icey 17y ago
Yeah, it's not like he wrote something that lots of people used like... mongrel, for example. [Edit: This comment doesn't really make much sense now, since the parent updated his comment to note that Zed ALSO wrote mongrel. I'd delete this comment except for reply attached to it.]
- antonovka 17y ago
  Do you know -- off the top of your head -- who the primary contributors are to Apache? They wrote the HTTP server that runs the web. [Edit] Why is the reply nonsense? The point is fairly clear -- there are far more established, widely used, complex and important projects that do not have such vitriolic personalities attached. Zed Shaw's known for his blog posts, not because of any proportionally notable contribution to the open source community. (The original unmodified comment referred to this reply as "nonsense").
  - nir 17y ago
    I pretty much agree with you. My comment was on the "online personality" part.
  - _pius 17y ago
    If one person wrote Apache, you'd probably know his or her name.
    - antonovka 17y ago
      Apache (originally NCSA HTTPd) was originally written by Robert McCool. He also drafted the initial CGI specification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McCool http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McCool http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/people/robm/ http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/people/robm/
      - _pius 17y ago
        Can't argue with that!
xtho 17y ago
ZS built a lot of his reputation before he switched to python -- see his rants on Ruby on Rails etc.

icey 17y ago

Yeah, it's not like he wrote something that lots of people used like... mongrel, for example. [Edit: This comment doesn't really make much sense now, since the parent updated his comment to note that Zed ALSO wrote mongrel. I'd delete this comment except for reply attached to it.]

antonovka 17y ago
Do you know -- off the top of your head -- who the primary contributors are to Apache? They wrote the HTTP server that runs the web. [Edit] Why is the reply nonsense? The point is fairly clear -- there are far more established, widely used, complex and important projects that do not have such vitriolic personalities attached. Zed Shaw's known for his blog posts, not because of any proportionally notable contribution to the open source community. (The original unmodified comment referred to this reply as "nonsense").
- nir 17y ago
  I pretty much agree with you. My comment was on the "online personality" part.
- _pius 17y ago
  If one person wrote Apache, you'd probably know his or her name.
  - antonovka 17y ago
    Apache (originally NCSA HTTPd) was originally written by Robert McCool. He also drafted the initial CGI specification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McCool http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McCool http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/people/robm/ http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/people/robm/
    - _pius 17y ago
      Can't argue with that!

xtho 17y ago

ZS built a lot of his reputation before he switched to python -- see his rants on Ruby on Rails etc.