There's more to a project than being a commiter. Shaw promoted Fossil, and people (a lot of people have heard of Shaw) looked into Fossil and started using it because of him. In that same thread you'll see someone else on the list spoke up as being one of those people.

That quote you gave is a reaction to the dismissive attitude that non-commiters are somehow second-class citizens; which you've just expressed. It's a bad way of thinking about people.

He used to be important in the Ruby community as the author of Mongrel. But yeah, if it's not massively hyperbolic,it's not Zed Shaw.

You have never heard of "Learn Python the Hard Way", the Mongrel server or "Rails is a Ghetto"?