[bdcravens]

It won't harm open source. Perhaps it'll harm future crowdfunding endeavors, as the trust level will be low. However, I think open source software that was funded on Kickstarter, but never delivered (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp) is far more of a threat than courseware.

[gary4gar]

Rails.app which is now called Tokaido is not dead, see this:

Kickstart Update: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp/post...

Source Code: https://github.com/tokaido/tokaidoapp

[bdcravens]

Never said it was dead, but the promises of that project still haven't been fulfilled (see the Deliverables section of the project - a GitHub repo that developers can build in XCode isn't the .app that was promised) Note that update you linked to came a day after a pretty energetic discussion on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116601