It impacts me as a developer because this potentially diminishes DHH's credibility in my eyes, and as the Rails BDFL, this has the potential to impact how I approach the platform I use to make a living.Well, all the code is available, right? You should base your decisions on the design and implementation of Rails, not on one of the author's blog. This is a really scary pattern emerging that I've noticed. It seems like people want to base their infrastructure decisions on things that don't matter. "Well, I would use $foo, but the website doesn't look very nice." "$foo seems nice, but the main author can be mean." If this is how you make IT decisions, I pity you.
(A while back, someone posted to my blog a comment that read, "Because you were so mean on CPAN Ratings, I've suggested to my clients that they use PHP instead of Catalyst." That doesn't seem like a very sound way of evaluating infrastructure decisions, especially since I am not the author of Catalyst. If they want to make more work for themselves because they don't like me, all I can do is point and laugh. Clearly I'm mentally ill, though.)