Of course they control Rails. Or are you telling me that I could this very minute submit some patch to Rails and announce that Rails 3.0 is out? I don't think s

Of course they control Rails. Or are you telling me that I could this very minute submit some patch to Rails and announce that Rails 3.0 is out? I don't think so. 37signals does not control Rails, these guys do: http://www.rubyonrails.org/core http://www.rubyonrails.org/core This is a group of developers that you could become a part of if you were so inclined (the usual petty open source politics notwithstanding). This is markedly different from having a commercial vendor in control of the product.