There is a difference in caring about the product, its professionalism and it’s ability to do the job and behaving like a bunch of school children – the point I was trying to illustrate.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s looking to use their hard earned cash to build a web site, they hear about rails/ruby/whatever, come accross what appears to be ramblings on a web site from the community and run like hell.

It’s the difference between weekend custom car enthusiasts who espouse the best shine on their car using product X and engineers who design cars in large production plants

Unfortuantely the ruby community isn’t the only one with its share of nutbags, all of which brings the nascent profession of software engineering (of which I’m a member) into disrepute and makes it a little more difficult for each of us who wishes to be a professional.

However, just because the web development community isn’t important to you, it doesn’t mean it’s not important to anyone at all. Let’s take your example: we might find the ‘marble community’ stupid. But guess what? It isn’t stupid to Jimmy. He loves his red marbles, he most likely celebrated when he his marble cracked Sam’s marble. Hell, Sam probably went home with his cracked marble all bummed out. In other words: They give a shit. People like myself and the others who responded above (well, maybe except for Zed) give a shit about this community.

I respect all communities, even if I don’t agree with what they do. I’m not too partial to Microsoft’s development languages and tools. But I don’t go to ASP.Net blogs and bash them for caring about that. So before you pass any judgment to anything that doesn’t share your sentiments, try to be in someone else’s shoes for a second.

Like anyone gives a shit.

@Juan: I guess Zed was saying that he actually wasn’t threatened directly, but rather indirectly by the actions of others involved. Of course, that’s his side of the story. I don’t think the issue here was to destroy people’s reputations or whatever. I don’t think the guys Zed directly mentioned will suddenly lose their position inside the Rails community. If you make money off of Rails, that’s cool. I’m doing the same too. That doesn’t make us evil or anything. I guess my point of this post was that while Zed was pretty straight-forward with his rant, his words do need to carry some weight, due to his previous work with Rails. About the Pickaxe book, I wonder why no one had mentioned these points before. I bought this book because it was the de-facto Ruby book, with rave reviews all over the Internet. His points are valid, but I think it’s a bit hypocritical that people are not ripping this book. Hopefully Dave will fix some of these issues in the future.

@dRÉc: Very funny… Although when I first bought the Pickaxe book a couple of years ago I immediately thought the same thing… Sorry Dave!