James Duncan Davidson is absolutely right about DHH's smug remarks:

The Canada on Rails conference is getting started and local co-Portlander Robby on Rails has already posted a bit of news about it. Here's another view. David is out of his mind. From all reports so far, it was part of a "if you don't like the way Rails is put together..." kind of statement, but it's so easy to take out of context. As they say, you probably had to be there to get the joke. I can understand the sentiment. Being a leader of a technology revolution is hard. It was, however, a terribly irresponsible thing for David to do. And I think that it reflects poorly on all the other people that have helped support and promote Rails.

I also like the comment from a Rails user named "ravy" on Robby Russell's blog:

Yeah, a couple of things lately have made me worry about Rails and my increasing investment in it.

This fairly dismissive treatment of people's legitimate concerns is one thing, which was brought home by DHH's blog posting about the "end of publishing" or whatever. Great, generalize from you own experience, but don't pretend that you have all the answers based on a sample size of one.

...

[I]f you are arrogant, this photo being a case in point, you don't learn anything.

Some of the people David is saying "Fuck You" to know a hell of a lot more about web applications and software engineering than he does. All of them know something about web applications that he doesn't, even if it's only about how they want to use the technology.

And it's this kind of attitude that leads to forked software.

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