That's a straw man. There is no mention of his original reasons for giving away his software. Only now, in hindsight, he realises it annoys him that of the great many users, not only do none credit him, but some even blame him. That's pretty harsh.
Is it? How many people using Linux know who, say, Ulrich Drepper or Alan Cox is? How many of the Apache installations in the world give Brian Behlendorf "credit"? That's just the nature of writing open source software -- IMHO the whole idea is to write something that other people find useful, and give it away.
And honestly, Zed complaining about a lack of attention and props is outrageous. The guy must have an enormous ego. Compared to most authors of open source software, he is far from anonymous.
And Brian's the highest-profile contributor to Apache. What about Rob McCool, Robert Thau, Roy Fielding, Ralf Engelschall, Rian Hunter, Rainer Jung, Rasmus Lerdorf, Rüdiger Plüm, and in some sense Randy Terbush? And those are just the contributors whose names begin with "R": http://httpd.apache.org/contributors/
You can charge a redistribution fee or something else instead of just giving away the software. Don't you dare suggest that people are unwilling to pay either, a lot of people buy Mac apps that do the simplest things. Those suckers don't even get access to the source code!
And, come on, he does get the credit. He gets lots of credit. He just wants more credit. Enough to go to the bank, it seems.
Kudos to Zed for giving the hackers code and the businesspeople invoices.
Fortunately, Phusion stepped in and wrote Passenger which now handles most Rails deployments.
Bottom line: Zed is a talented hacker but he's maybe 1 in 100, not 1 in 1000 or 1 in 5000. If he hadn't written mongrel someone else would have, and he'd just be another anonymous guy with a chip on his shoulder and a bit of DHH envy :)
Any work should be fulfilling in itself, and one should wish to do it with or without pay. I think the MIT license is the one that best embodies coding as art, and I have tremendous respect for people with the balls to license their code under it.
I don't care about support, but for Zed to be mad that nobody wanted to hire him as a consultant for mongrel is a bit absurd considering that he abruptly quit maintaining the product. What's to say he wouldn't just walk away from a consulting gig if his feathers got ruffled.
You can't just make software, give it away, and expect money to rain down on you from everywhere it is used — it doesn't work like that.
If you want money from your software you need to offer it with a business model coupled with either advertising or a price point. But you knew that already.
It seems strange to me that, as he says: "when I would try to get work, it was impossible for me to explain the magnitude of Mongrel’s impact". Who was he talking to in these companies? My point is that MBA's don't care about Mongrel. HR drones don't care about Mongrel. If that's who he wants to target, stop building the next mail server and start building to next twitter -- it's probably less technically interesting but you'll be more popular.
Open source software is wonderful because it keeps us programmers from constantly reinventing the wheel. It gives us all the collective ability to improve the infrastructure that our products depend on. It's not really surprising that the most mature, stable, and user-friendly products are operating systems, web servers, database servers, and so on. It's bottom layer that programmers use to build software products regular people use.
Zed's pissed because Mongrel doesn't get mentioned anywhere. I use open source software in my business all the time to advance what we can deliver to our customers; if someone wants to know what we run, I'll tell them. But guess what, they don't want to know!
If all Zed wanted was credit, he should have picked a product with more MBA appeal. Instead he build a web server -- that's infrastructure -- and nobody outside of the programming community gives a crap about infrastructure. It's the final product that matters. Even if Ruby on Rails gets mentioned, most people wouldn't know the difference between it and PHP. All they know is that you're in the same camp as 37 signals. Just as companies that use PHP will say it's the same technology that powers Facebook.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter what license he gives his software for the game he's playing. The rest of us, however, just want to get our work done.