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.