By way of disclosure, I make my living off of Ruby on Rails. I'm not a mover or shaker -- not on the core team, and at most, I hang out on the #rubyonrails channels. I never met Zed Shaw, but I have known of him as the creator of Mongrel. The interviews with him about Mongrel were always prefixed by the author that he talks bluntly with a lot of zingers. Guess that meant he was really foul-mouthed.

I have also read through this entire, long rant. I can't say whether he was being truthful about not having a job as a result of Mongrel though I don't doubt it. I do know a lot of the things he ranted about in the Rails community were true, from my perspective.

For example, that weird http://example.com/posts/1;edit was a very strange one. I thought that looked pretty ugly the first time I saw it. When it got finally fixed in the 1.2 and 2.0 series, the release note contained a very strange note. It said that it was "fixed" because some servers like Mongrel could not handle it, suggesting that it was a result of some brokenness on Mongrel's part.

That was very strange to me because I knew Mongrel's HTTP parser was actually generated straight from the RFC. If anything, it is probably the world's most standards-compliant HTTP implementation.

$500 for 5 minutes of work for someone of Zed's quality is pretty cheap, by my book. http://fridayreflections.typepad.com/weblog/2007/12/experien...

The 'Ezra' referenced as the creator of Merb is widely known as the go-to guy to make your Rails deployment scale.

I don't know about the cgi bug. I do know making the cookies-based session key default is really weird. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81932

The stuff about the core team's herd mentality is true from what I've seen hanging out on #rubyonrails for nearly two years. You can also look at the record on the number of rejected patches on the Rails tracker. The general consensus among the folks who try contributing stuff, but not on the core team, is that if they don't use it, it is unlikely to make it in. In a lot of ways, that is similar to the way Linus Torvald's works with Linux kernel devs, with the exception that every Linux core dev has their own repo you can pull off of as an alternative to the "official" Linux kernel.

Finally, the bit about passive-aggressive behavior. That's something I see in any grouping of techies and geeks. I try to avoid it where I can, but it still gets under my skin. My tendency is to confront the issue and then be done with it. The first part of Zed's rant seems full of hate, but the boxing ring strikes me as a good idea.

A good friend of mine once explained to me about the passive-aggressiveness at the local university's lan-gamer's club. Two brothers took official positions in that student club. The older one is passive-aggressive, and the younger one is just aggressive. I perfer hanging out with the younger one. Sure, he can go beserk but at least he's honest about it :-) My friend told me the older brother was a better fit as the club president simply because he knows how use passive-aggressiveness effectively. That in a group like that with a high percentage of passive-aggressive people, these guys will not respond to any social sanctions unless it is in passive-aggressive form. Which is also why I don't really hang out with the gamer's club. Meanwhile, the younger brother is more marginalized when it comes to influencing that group.

All of this makes for a very interesting discussion when put in the context of this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92792

Despite making a living off of Rails, I have not really gone out of my way to network with other Rails dev so I can't really say if the percentage of passive-aggressive devs are greater in the Rails community than without. I can say that I'm not surprised that Zed got marginalized like this, even after writing awesome code like Mongrel.

I have been hearing about Merb for a while on #rubyonrails. After reading this article, I think it is about time to take a serious look at it. I don't want to give up Ruby, but Rails has always been a means to an end.