For starters, I'm not justifying anything Martin did, as I never said he was right in any way, don't try to put words in mouth. As a matter of fact, I agreed on the following: 1) Zed has every right to complain due to his copyright and the license which his work carries 2) What Martin did was wrong, and as such he should accept that fact that the owner disapproves and take the work down (which he did) 3) Martin violated Zed's copyright. I explicitly said that what he did was copyright infringement, which can certainly be attributed to a mistake, because you wrongly stated it was plagiarism, which is considered morally unacceptable and reprehensible, and is in no way the same thing.
You want to know what IS irrelevant? The fact that Martin and Zed (and both you and me actually) both acknowledged that the approach is not useful, specially since I already stated in the grandparent post - to which you responded - that I agreed on not only Zed's rights as copyright holder, but also on the fact that the approach is rubbish. It doesn't matter whatsoever if the approach works or not, it only matters that Martin did it in good faith because he believed it could be of use when he started, even if later he discovered to be wrong on this count.
I addressed your fart noises on my second point of the parent post, on the last paragraph I was referring to actual farting because it is more representative of what happened here. I referred to them separately and referred to 'farting' and 'farting noises' to make this clear (as they are obviously two different things). The fact that you equate a jerk making farting noises in a restaurant with making a mistake in regards to a free book's licensing is beyond my comprehension, as it implies that you're disagreeing with the intent of the person in question when it was already not only stated by him, but by Zed himself in his messages.
Also, it's "make fart noises", not "fart". As in deliberately make a noise considered rude.
You said it yourself, the key word on this example is 'deliberately'. Martin did not make deliberately farting noises (deliberately and knowingly doing copyright infringement on Zed's work), he actually farted by mistake (mistakenly having violated Zed's copyright thinking it was fair use), and because of this he should apologize to the restaurant, but such events in no way grant Zed the right to humiliate, demean, or degrade Martin. I'm not justifying Martin's actions, as I agree that he's wrong and Zed is right, I'm criticizing Zed's responses and the manner in which he expressed himself towards not only towards Martin, but towards the Ruby community itself.
The funny thing is that I actually respect Zed for his contributions, and isn't someone I'll be deleting from my newsreader because of something as non-important as this. That doesn't change his attitude was reprehensible, and that he could have handled it better.