David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

I don't have to get all of it out of it.

This is sometimes just as with the guy who thought I'd given up on being Jira or something instead of doing Basecamp.

There are people over the years who've asked like, why didn't you charge for Rails?

Like, don't you know how much money have been made off Rails?

If we just look at something like Shopify, it's worth billions of dollars.

I'm not a billionaire.

And so freaking what?

I got more than enough.

I got plenty of my share.

I will say, though, I'm also introspective enough to realize that if it hadn't panned out as well as it did for me on my own business, maybe I would have been more tempted.

Maybe if you see other people build huge, successful companies off the back of your work and you really don't have a pot to piss in, you might be tempted to get a little...

upset about that.

I've seen that in the Rails world as well, where there are people who contributed substantial bodies of work and then got really miffed when they didn't feel like they got enough back.

I was fortunate enough that the business that Jason and I built with Ruby on Rails was as successful as it was, and I made the money I needed to make that I didn't need to chase the rest of it.

Maybe.

I also think of

This example with Matt, he probably thought there was easy money for the taking and it wasn't so easy, was it?

It looked like low hanging dollar bills and they turned out to be some really sour grapes.

It turned out he turned, he probably destroyed vast sums of money by undermining the whole WordPress trust and the ecosystem and putting question marks in the heads of folks who would choose to use WordPress or something else going forward.

So I often think when people think like, oh, you left money on the table.