The OP likewise spent his life (or some substantial part thereof) honing the skills required to do this (and do it in a short space of time) then give it away for free including source code.
At that point you have to acknowledge either the significant charity of that act or the relatively small nature of the original idea (not to belittle or impugn dcurtis's abilities, motives or skills in any way).
Look, I would take this as a relatively cheap entrepreneurial lesson: if your idea is extremely reproducible it can still be a business but you need to be first and you need to be ready to scale. Invite-only works for things that are hard to reproduce and/or have some kind of lock-in or network effect.
Definitely a good lesson and that's why one needs to view the product with a wider perspective which should dictate the right strategy to take.
It's a complicated issue without a clean or simple answer. Arguably this is why different people have different thoughts on the software patent issue. Most people have a very black and white view of it but there's a lot of nuance that makes the issue shades of gray.
I also suspect the reaction would be entirely different (I think someone mentioned it in this thread) if Nate didn't open source it. I wonder why that's the case.
I absolutely agree with you. I think for a lot of people, including myself, however, the best marketing approach would have been to say "check this out, I did something cool, and I've open sourced it." This is what dcurtis probably should have done. He didn't do any groundbreaking rails code, and there was very little value in having a new workflow of blogging exist only on his servers. I think the value of Nate open sourcing it is much higher than if he had just built a clone and kept it to himself.
Basically, the community response supporting Nate is strong because he did something that benefits the community as a whole, where as dcurtis did something that benefited only himself and then shouted about it.
That's my (pretty myopic and polemic) take on all this.
But as the story is not about copyright, but about perceived entitlement, its also completely irrelevant.
Fact is, if Dustin hadn't done anything innovative (ie, worth cloning), we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Let me make a better parallel: a lemonade stand. Dustin thought "wow, the weather is nice. I'd like some lemonade." He made some especially good lemonade, added a little cranberry, and wrote about how good it was. Someone else, who hadn't previously wanted lemonade thought, "hey, I would also like some lemonade. Hadn't thought of cranberry before, I wonder if that's any good..."
And now we're having a conversation about how anyone who makes cranberry lemonade is stealing from Dustin.
I think the conversation is being had more because of the way Dustin presented what he did rather than what he presented.
Many successful have had both. You can make the case that Steve Jobs drove the Apple ideas but Tim Cook was the one who made sure the entire production chain was as efficiently run as possible.
Reminds me of a story about Picasso: A woman asks Picasso to paint a painting of her, five minutes later there's a wonderful painting of her. When she asks Picasso how much she owes, he quotes her 5,000 francs. She's surprised by how much it is and tells him that it only took him 5 minutes. He responds with "No, it took me my entire life."
This is an extreme comparison but I just want to highlight that there's a value to the experience that people have. As hackers we tend to underestimate that since we focus on the more visible tech skills.