It's hard to judge any case without seeing the full information. But based on the post, the company agreed to pay him to do design work, which he then did. If they change their mind a few days later, that's their issue - they are still legally bound to pay. I would never not pay a freelancer I hired, unless they literally didn't do the work.
I think the key thing here is 'what are we betting on?'. The analogy to Facebook doesn't work, as the developers have bet on different things. The apps that Twitter are calling out are ones that are trying to replace Twitter itself as a consumption device for end-users. Can you name one major Facebook app that does that? I can't. When Facebook saw a good pure social innovation in an app, they didn't hesitate to copy it. However apps that have built on top of Facebook to add value in different ways have been actively supported by Facebook for years. Twitter themselves in the announcement make this distinction - do something different than just trying to replace us for end users (e.g. a business management tool, a cool data analysis tool) and we'll support you; otherwise get lost.
I don't really think this is hostility - I think it makes sense for Twitter and for developers; people who've just been trying to replace Twitter themselves were always fighting a losing battle.
We're expanding our team of developers to work both on interactive games and apps on Facebook for big brand clients, and also to work on Conversocial, a Python/Django SaaS tool to help companies manage conversations with their customers across social platforms. We're a bootstrapped start-up, have gone from 2 to 10 people in two years and now looking to grow fast. We buy lunch for everyone every day;p
I love how fast Safari 5 is (faster than Chrome for me) - but the UI of Chrome just makes browsing and navigation much, much better (auto hiding everything you don't need, combining URL and search bar etc). Apple should have learned from Chrome, it's superior.
My company iPlatform is looking for great devs to join us in Soho, London - we're building products to help companies manage conversations online, funded by a service side building Facebook apps for big brands. http://theiplatform.com/jobs/ - we code in Python. Come say hello!
I strongly recommend you read 'Four steps to the Epiphany' by Steve Blank. As a business focused founder, you need to be handling customer development - really going out there, talking to customers, understanding who is your core market, getting paying customers, validating this into a proper scalable business, and developing your company positioning. That's a LOT of work - but it's ESSENTIAL for the success of any company. I'm on my 3rd business, and the 2nd one crashed because I didn't understand this. No business exists in a vacuum - what your product-focused founders are doing is important, but your role in developing the customer understanding and scalable business model is equally so.
