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Django, too [1]:

> In fall 2003, the World Online developers (Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison) ditched PHP and began using Python to develop its websites. As they built intensive, richly interactive sites such as Lawrence.com, they began to extract a generic web development framework that let them build web applications more and more quickly. They tweaked this framework constantly, adding improvements over two years.

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/faq/general/

but 37signals didn't try to turn Rails into a business

Well they kinda did. The early rails was rarely well documented. You had to buy books (developed by the rails team) to get everything together. At least I felt this way when I dived into rails pre 1.0.

I'm not sure it's fair to criticise a company that puts it's secret sauce open source under a very liberal license for not spending more resources on writing free docs as their main priority. The growing community very quickly took up on that one and the docs got very good fast.

Please elaborate

Rails was the internal tool/backend of basecamp and got later its own project with great success.

But rails wasn't the pivot of Basecamp into devtools, it was just a by-product, and hence rails never needed to take VC money to become a unicorn