Response to DHH

>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?

I'm just going to tell a little story here.

A long time ago, I worked on a recolorable Drupal theme, which was to be the new default look (Garland). It was completed and awaiting the next major release. Before that happened though, Matt Mullenweg grabbed the theme and the assets from our repo, ported it to Wordpress, and offered it as a theme on wp dot com to his customers.

When this was pointed out as being in extremely poor taste, he hid behind the GPL as the justification. WP was large enough already at the time that they could get away with stuff like this without suffering too much PR damage.

In short, if he's bragging about how much money he's making, it's because he has few scruples and doesn't actually care about credit and respect.

If this happened in public, links?

here you go! https://acko.net/blog/wordpress-com-copies-drupal-theme/ https://wordpress.com/blog/2006/12/12/new-theme-garland-and-...

I just read the links you gave about the port and I wanted to say I'm just sorry for both you and Stefan Nagtegaal. What a gut punch to not even get to release your work in the way you intended before it was taken. Ugh.

Ah man, that’s brutal. For what it’s worth, it’s a gorgeous theme and it made me excited to learn Drupal when I was 14!

If I didn't got it wrong, Matt asked about copying it, you said it was ok because it is GPL and you think that makes him a bad person?

I think this outrage against Matt is terrible in many ways but people are getting away with accusing him of anything they felt wronged. We are talking about a guy that created something in the level of Linux and Wikipedia. Give him some credit and respect ffs.

They said something like “you’re allowed, but we’d prefer you didn’t.”

So it’s a “you’re not wrong you’re just an asshole” situation.