So Apple is also an "opinionated" vendor, so what? Not happy? Try developing for Android or something else. Really, what are the merits for this guy to complain about it given his own stand regarding Rails?
You're comparing apples vs oranges ... Rails is an open-source web-framework. If you don't like its directions and you'd like to change that, you can always fork it without gettings sued ... and forks/clones in other languages have happened and are thriving.
His merits are that he's a contributor to an open-source piece of software that changed people's perceptions and he's also a founder of 37signals, a small business that's quite profitable (which is a lot more than I can say for myself).
It's a free market... anyone can create their own platform from scratch. Even you and me. But it's hard, right? Anyway, it's not as if Apple had a special license to address this market.
By the way, IP is far from being the only cost involved in building an ecosystem around a platform (as ESR has explained ad nauseum). So the "Rails is OSS" argument doesn't really apply here.
Isn't there a recent lawsuit involving Apple accusing HTC of infringing 20 patents, even though HTC is not the stereotypical Chinese cloning machine? Isn't Steve Jobs expressing his frustrations with Android every chance he gets, even though there's lots of prior art in the mobile OS space?
Apple surely acts like it's having a special license to address this market (whatever that means).
So I don't know why we are having this conversation. Being opinionated doesn't mean you need to be a jerk that prevents others from playing on the same beach.
Now you are comparing apples to oranges. Proprietary and open approaches work very well in different scenarios (there hasn't been a lack of experiments in OSS for smartphones for example).
Some innovations, when developed via a proprietary approach bring huge costs and risks (and couldn't be done otherwise) and patents exist to protect the innovators from free loaders.
Now, that's how it should work in principle. If Apple is trying to game that model, it is not up to me to decide. There are courts for that.
And, as I said before, IP is far from being the only important cost when creating a new platform.
"Ruby on Rails" is copyrighted to its creator. So what? Why is it so? Isn't that an "asset" within the economics of OSS? It is, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it being copyrighted.
Anyway, my point is that none of this justifies the fact that the Rails guy is simply being utterly hypocrite, period.
