David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

I would like to see him do well with this.

But I also think there's some principles at stake here that ring much louder.

I don't want Rails to suddenly be tainted by the fact that it's open source and whether companies can rely on it and build businesses on it because, wait, maybe one day I'm going to turn Matt and I'm going to turn Matt King and I'm going to show up with a demand ransom letter.

No, screw that.

We have...

Way more to protect here.

There's way more at stake than your personal beef with someone or your perceived grievance over what you're owed.

Decide.

This is the curious thing.

He could decide to give this up.

That's very, very difficult for driven, ambitious people to do, to accept that they're wrong and to give up and lay down their sword.

So I had a hope earlier on in this that that was possible.

I haven't seen any evidence that Matt is interested in that, and I find that deeply regretful, but that's his prerogative.

I continue to speak out when he's violating the spirit and ethics of open source, but I wish he would just accept that this was a

Really bad idea.

He just, he made a bad bet.

And I thought, I think he thought he'd just get away with it, that they'd just pay up and that he could put pressure.

I mean, I know that temptation when you sit as the head of a very important project and

you know that that comes with a great degree of power and you really need a great degree of discipline to rein that in and not exercise that power at every step where you feel aggrieved.

I've felt aggrieved a million times over in the 20 plus years of Ruby on Rails.