I have spent twenty years working on open source sustainability, so watching a fight ignite between Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson and WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg this week felt uncomfortably familiar in a way I wish it didn't.
David Heinemeier Hansson (also known as DHH) released a new kanban tool, Fizzy, this week and called it open source.
People quickly pointed out that the O'Saasy license that Fizzy is released under blocks others from offering a competing SaaS version, which violates the Open Source Initiative's definition. When challenged, he brushed it off on X and said, "You know this is just some shit people made up, right?". He followed with "Open source is when the source is open. Simple as that".
This morning, Matt Mullenweg rightly pushed back. He argued that you can't ignore the Open Source Initiative definition. He compared it to North Korea calling itself a democracy. A clumsy analogy, but the point stands.
Look, the term "open source" has a specific, shared meaning. It is not a loose idea and not something you can repurpose for marketing. Thousands of people shaped that definition over decades. Ignoring that work means benefiting from the community while setting aside its rules.
This whole debate becomes spicier knowing that DHH was on Lex Fridman's podcast only a few months ago, appealing to the spirit and ethics of open source to criticize Matt's handling of the WP Engine dispute. If the definition is just "shit people made up", what spirit was Matt violating?
The definition debate matters, but the bigger issue here is sustainability. DHH's choice of license reacts to a real pressure in open source: many companies make real money from open source software while leaving the hard work of building and maintaining it to others.
This tension also played a role in Matt's fight with WP Engine, so he and DHH share some common ground, even if they handle it differently. We see the same thing in Drupal, where the biggest companies do not always contribute at the same level.
DHH can experiment because Fizzy is new. He can choose a different license and see how it works. Matt can't as WordPress has been under the GPL for more than twenty years. Changing that now is virtually impossible.
Both conversations are important, but watching two of the most influential people in open source argue about definitions while we all wrestle with free riders feels a bit like firefighters arguing about hose lengths during a fire.
The definition debate matters because open source only works when we agree on what the term means. But sustainability decides whether projects like Drupal, WordPress, and Ruby on Rails keep thriving for decades to come. That is the conversation we need to have.
In Drupal, we are experimenting with contribution credits and with guiding work toward companies that support the project. These ideas have helped, but also have not solved the imbalance.
Six years ago I wrote in my Makers and Takers blog post that I would love to see new licenses that "encourage software free riding", but "discourage customer free riding". O'Saasy is exactly that kind of experiment.
A more accurate framing would be that Fizzy is source available. You can read it, run it, and modify it. But DHH's company is keeping the SaaS rights because they want to be able to build a sustainable business. That is defensible and generous, but it is not open source.
I still do not have the full answer to the open source sustainability problem. I have been wrestling with it for more than twenty years. But I do know the solution is not renaming the problem.
Some questions are worth asking, and answering:
- How do we distinguish between companies that can't contribute and those that won't?
- What actually changes corporate behavior: shame, self-interest, punitive action, exclusive benefits, or regulation?
If this latest fight nudges us away from word games and toward these questions, some good may come from it.