What name are you submitting patches for AR under (I'm not finding any under your username here, http://dev.rubyonrails.org/search?q=keiretsu&wiki=on&changeset=on&ticket=on) ? I'd like to check some of them out to see what your doing. I'm assuming your not just complaining about a free open source project and that your actually doing something about it, since just complaining is pretty bad for your karma.
It's no longer okay to complain? If I didn't like something, I'd prefer to complain and not use it than waste my time fixing something I find fundamentally flawed.
No, It's not ok to just go around complaining. If you don't like it, that's fine, don't use it, but to just go around posting completely unproven slander about a completely free project is another matter completely.
I love that there are some people here that seem to think they are entitled to something or that 37s or DHH owes you something. It's open source, you have 3 options:
1. Fix it and get kudos.
2. Don't fix it (because your either too dumb or too lazy) and work around it.
3. Don't use it.
But coming on here and making some generalized proclamation that RoR is slow is irresponsible and unacceptable, IMO.
While Open Source, I think Ruby on Rails is still a commercial project. Just think about the buzz it generates for 37signals, which probably converts directly to revenue. So I don't see why somebody shouldn't have the right to "complain" about it, or have an opinion about it, or decide to use something else.
Maybe the 37signals don't give a damn about who is using their framework. That would also be an indicator against using it, because it would mean bad support. If they do care about who is using it, then they might also care about people's opinions about it. I think Open Source projects DO compete - just think about the submissions you request. If an open source project is not popular, nobody will submit patches or features for it, either. Then it won't grow, and eventually die.
Since when is it up to 37 Signals to provide support for their framework? (Which by the way they do a pretty good job of - RailsConf anyone?) Its OPEN SOURCE so instead of whining you should go fix it, and if you don't want to fix it then go use something else.
RoR is not a panacea, but it certainly is "good enough" for a lot of things, think of all the 37 Signals apps.
I guess we just think differently about what makes a venture or business successful. Whatever... By support I didn't mean the "send a guy in to fix our bugs kind of support", just the level of trust you can put into a framework. You know, the "will there be anyone around in two years to still work on that" issue that seems to matter to some companies. You can just open source some random chunks of code that have been lieing around on your hard disk. Or you can "publish" something open source, which means that you will polish it a bit, add some documentation, generalise some things to make them more useful etc.
I wonder, though, if this case of Open Source fury is directly related to the Twitter vs RoR debate, and also to DHHs attitude? Serious question - I don't know about DHH well enough to judge his attitude, it's just a feeling that is in the air.