Why are you still so small?

What is this thing?

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH from here on) is a software developer and entrepreneur. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a web application framework on which many very succesful businesses have been built over the years. AirBnB, GitHub, Netflix, and Shopify are a few examples.

Ruby on Rails is open-source software, distributed under the MIT License.

In October 2024 DHH published two posts on his personal blog: Automattic is doing open source dirty (8 Oct 2024) and Open source royalty and mad kings (13 Oct 2024).

The posts were strongly critical of the actions Mr. Mullenweg had taken since he launched his self-described “nuclear scorched earth” campaign against hosting company WP Engine when, presumably, it became clear that WP Engine were not going to give in to his demand for 8% of their gross revenue.

Mr. Mullenweg was not happy with DHH’s criticism. He thought the first post had “an abomination of a headline”, while the second one was “just sloppy”. He felt he was “forced to reply publicly”.

He did. But, instead of addressing the criticism, he addressed the person. The main (in fact, single) thrust of Mr. Mullenweg’s reply was that DHH has only been able to “capture” a small part of the value that his work and ideas allowed others to create: “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.”

Mr. Mullenweg then advised DHH to seek help from a therapist or coach in order to fix this defect in his person that prevented him from extracting more value out of his ideas and, as a result, from becoming as big as Mr. Mullenweg or even bigger:

David, perhaps it would be good to explore with a therapist or coach why you keep having these great ideas but cannot scale them beyond a handful of niche customers. I will give full credit and respect. 37signals inspired tons of what Automattic does! We’re now half a billion in revenue. Why are you still so small?

It is worth noting, for people unfamiliar with DHH, that DHH is no stranger to controversy himself. He is a well respected figure but he is also known for statements and actions that have been controversial. The two posts Mr. Mullenweg took issue with could well be the very first time in the history of the web that DHH said something most people agreed with.

If you know of people other than Mr. Mullenweg who have taken issue with DHH’s criticism, please share your information with us and we would be happy to add it to this article.

It was also interesting to see that DHH took Mr. Mullenweg’s reply much better that most people would:

Maybe I’m supposed to get mad at this, but instead I just get sad. Mullenweg clearly sees it as a failure to create much more value in the world than what you capture, and maybe that’s the root of our differences. I see that as a proud achievement.

Source

The original reply by Mr. Mullenweg has now been taken down. It was replaced by a milder reply consisting of various unconvincing arguments. You can find the original reply at various places on the web. You can also view this screencap we host on our server: 2024-10-14-ma.tt-on-dhh.png