I’ll just remind everyone at the start that this is a respectful debate, and DHH and I tried to get on a call but couldn’t because we were both traveling.

However, “Automattic is doing open source dirty” is an abomination of a headline, and David’s second post Open source royalty and mad kings, is just sloppy. So I’m forced to reply publicly:

DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others. Let’s look at 37signals portfolio:

• Hey, proprietary, some sort of email / calendar / blogging thing that almost no one uses. It’s trying to be Gmail/Workspace and Medium at the same time. And you can arbitrarily cut off anyone publishing with Hey, they have no open source rights.
• Campfire, proprietary, you invented Slack but they took the idea and built a $900M/ARR business with it, while you are trying to make shrinkwrap licensing a “thing” with Once.
• Writebook, proprietary. Pretty cool.
• Basecamp, proprietary. Great software. You invented the ideas Atlassian ran with and built a $4.4B/revenue and growing business. (Update: Atlassian actually started a few years before Basecamp, thanks for the correction Mike!)
• Rails, finally some open source! Looks like ~943k lines of code, 143k from Basecamp org. Automattic publishes 6.58M lines of open source code, 6.9x more than you. Yet, we’re “doing open source dirty”? Shopify used Rails to build a $7B/revenue and growing business, why didn’t you?

I was surprised someone as smart as DHH would fall for WP Engine’s lame deferral to make this about “GPL code” or forking, rather than trademarks. We have no problem with their use of GPL code, our beef is with their trademark abuse.

Let’s talk about trademarks! I don’t own the WordPress trademark personally, it belongs to a foundation on which I’m one of three votes. Rails?

“Rails”, “Ruby on Rails”, and the Rails logo are registered trademarks of David Heinemeier Hansson, but are under exclusive license to The Rails Foundation, which is responsible for administering their use and permission. You may not use these trademarks in a commercial setting to imply that your product or service is endorsed or associated with Ruby on Rails without permission. You may use these marks to refer to Ruby on Rails in a way where it’s clear that you’re simply referring to the project, not claiming endorsement or association.

Huh, sounds like if I wanted to start RailsEngine I would need a trademark license. You are ignoring WP Engine’s trademark abuse while retaining the same for your Rails trademark. The same as Drupal, where “Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert, who retains sole ownership and control of this policy and any trademark licensing.” (Dries has also decided to drop in on this debate.)

Dries or David could arbitrarily withdraw their trademarks from the foundations / etc. at any time and for any reason or no reason. If they die, it’s not clear what happens to the trademarks. Their communities should look into that and consider a different name or taking over the trademark into a Foundation with multiple board members.

David, perhaps instead of spending $2M on a race car, you should do some philanthropy.

Instead of bragging about your beautiful office in the clouds, you should question why you can’t scale teams.

When you did a (less generous) buy-out offer 33% of your team left, vs 8.4% of mine.

I’m unsure why you felt you had to insert yourself into this fight with Silver Lake / WP Engine and take their side, but here we are.

Respectfully,
Matt