Actually, if you read the rant, it's also about money.

Kudos to Zed for giving the hackers code and the businesspeople invoices.

Zed has what is known as "open source remorse"... he should be honored that people respect his code and want to use it in their apps... doing so was (in hindsight) a risky proposition b/c he abruptly stopped supporting Mongrel after a petty (and embarrassing) spat with others in the Rails community.

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.

You basically just said that Phusion wasted their time re-inventing the wheel instead of supporting Mongrel and making it better. The whole point of releasing the code is to stop wheel re-invention...If you want to rely on Zed or any other Free software developer for support, start paying them.

Not at all. Phusion uses a different approach with different design goals... It would have been a lot more work to rewrite mongrel to handle those additional goals.

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.

And what really is wrong with that? Surely if consumers of his software can do that, why is he held to different standards?

It's not about different standards, it's about different approach.

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.

Well, in a sense that's what he's doing now - the whole "Open source to open source, corporation to corporation" bit.

He's not being held to a different standard. Microsoft doesn't get credit for every memo or power point presentation! Why should Zed get credit for every web site? It doesn't make sense. He wrote a cog.

Microsoft, on the other hand, gets paid for every memo and presentation, even though they just "wrote a cog". It's not unreasonable for Zed to desire something in return for writing a cog, even if he perhaps has not been using an optimal strategy for achieving it.

Microsoft gets paid because they're a business. It is unreasonable because Zed is not running a business. Running a business is hard -- a lot harder than just writing software and releasing it to the wind.