I have a lot of trouble understanding this mentality.

I totally get paying when you don't have to in order to support fellow developers. I've got a nice collection of apps on my phone and desktop, all purchased, that I've acquired over the years to support my friends' development efforts. So if Marco wants to help out Macromates, that's fine. More power to him.

But I don't understand this mantra of, "We'll forgive you; just charge everyone." Let's ignore entirely whether that's a contract violation and just focus on whether it's fair.

Zoom back several years to the era Marco's talking about. TextMate 1.0 ships. It's a nice editor--really nice, actually--but it has a lot of rough edges to it. But, Allen promises, buy now anyway; upgrades through version 2.0 are completely free. So a lot of people, including me, slapped down money to buy version 1.0 on this promise. (And in my case, also to support an upstart dev who was daring to take down the 800-pound gorilla of Mac text editors, Bare Bones' BBEdit.)

But that promise never materialized. TextMate got a lot of improvements initially, but there's now a relatively large collection of third-party plugins you need just to achieve parity with the now-native versions of Vim and Emacs that can be had for free.

And in exchange for not shipping anything for literally years, you want to reward him by paying him more?

What am I missing here?

Disclaimer: I was previously a Zynga employee and I am presently a holder of Zynga stock. I have no knowledge of Zynga's current internal state - the following is entirely speculation.

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There are many forces at work here that need to be brought to light.

* Macro Trend #1 - Facebook's web traffic is in decline[1]. These users are shifting to mobile as their primary consumption channel for Facebook. No facebook app developer has presence on the mobile app.

* Macro Trend #2 - Zynga's game launches are smaller than ever. For many reasons, it's getting harder to launch a 5M+ DAU game.

Zynga is responding to these trends in several ways.

* Leverage their warchest[2] to make acquisitions. This lets them launch a higher volume of games and help them get a foothold in mobile. Zynga has made a LOT of acquisitions this year[3].

* Further monetize their existing base. They've been pushing partner deals really hard recently, doing deals with Lady Gaga[4], Amex[5], and Capital One[6]

Zynga's games are more high quality than ever. Gone are the days of "fuck innovation", two of Zynga's most recent releases are the best they've ever built. The issue is that the market for FB games is in decline - the next big wave is mobile. If Zynga can become a player by launching a hit or acquiring a large chunk of the space, they'll be doing better than ever. But so far, Zynga's mobile releases have flopped.

TL;DR - Zynga's profits are a sign that they have doubled down on acquisitions to counter-balance a market shift from web to mobile. Their future prospects lie in their ability to generate hits on the iPhone.

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[1] - http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/12/facebook-sees-big-t...

[2] - http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2011/08/11/zynga-credit-1-bi...

[3] - http://mashable.com/2011/05/18/zynga-dna-games/

[4] - http://mashable.com/2011/05/10/zynga-gaga-gagaville/

[5] - http://www.zynga.com/about/article.php?a=20101130

[6] - http://blog.games.com/2011/09/19/farmville-cityville-pioneer...

This man is described as an "independent market trader" in the attached article. His twitter profile ( http://twitter.com/#!/alessiorastani ) describes him as a "Keynote speaker" and a "Mentor and dedicated to helping others succeed". That doesn't exactly inspire much confidence. In fact, it is pretty obvious that he has set out to make a name for himself through this controversy.

Furthermore, he has obviously bet heavily on a near-term market crash. He's now financially and emotionally invested in a market crash, so of course he will be confident that it's going to happen. And if his doomsday video circulates the internet and makes a dent, however tiny, in investor sentiment then he has also effectively pushed the market (in a very tiny way) toward his goal.

Take a look at one of his recent tweets: "I've been waiting for this stock market crash for 3 years. #finance #economy"

The world economy is in trouble, no doubt, but let's remain reasonable and rational here. Spend enough time around financial types, and you can always find a doomsayer like this man in any sort of economy.