For those of us observing from the sidelines, the great Wordpress fight of 2024 is getting ugly. It’s feeling more like giant companies battling about money.

Last week, DHH chimed in on one of the issues at hand:

And yet, I can see where this is coming from. Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework I created, has been used to create businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars combined. Some of those businesses express their gratitude and self-interest by supporting the framework with dedicated developers, membership of The Rails Foundation, or conference sponsorships. But many also do not! And that is absolutely their right, even if it occasionally irks a little.

For any successful open source project there are bound to be many more users of the project than contributors. I’m guilty of this for sure. I don’t have the drive like many others to contribute freely to open source. I would like to spend more time here, but it’s low on my long list of priorities. And that’s okay!

That’s the deal. That’s open source. I give you a gift of code, you accept the terms of the license. There cannot be a second set of shadow obligations that might suddenly apply, if you strike it rich using the software. Then the license is meaningless, the clarity all muddled, and certainty lost.

Bingo. I saw a lot of feedback this past week basically saying “gosh I don’t usually don’t agree with DHH, but he’s exactly right this time.”

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Matt Mullenweg had originally published a rather nasty post in response, but it was taken down. I’m glad Mullenweg reconsidered. There’s no need for personal attacks in any of this. He did leave a few responses which are reasonable arguments.

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I can’t shake the feeling that I wouldn’t want to be building a business on Wordpress right now. It used to be the safe, stable, easy choice. Things change.