Automattic is completely out of line and the potential damage to the open source world extends far b – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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The latest on the WordPress fight over trademarks and open source

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“Automattic is completely out of line, and the potential damage to the open source world extends far beyond WordPress,”

writes David Heinemeier Hansson, the CTO at 37signals and creator of the open-source framework Ruby on Rails.

DHH says it “occasionally irks” him to see companies failing to contribute to Ruby on Rails, but that’s the rules:

None of the major licenses, however, say anything close to “it’s free but only until the project owners deem you too successful and then you’ll have to pay 8% of your revenues to support the project”. That’s a completely bonkers and arbitrary standard based in the rule of spite, not law.

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