That's a very shallow assessment of Automattic's business, which has over half a billion in revenue and much of it not from WordPress. You also assume that investor pressure could drive company decisions, which is ridiculous given I vote 84% of the stock. Automattic has infinite runway, we're not a startup stumbling from funding round to funding round.
Automattic (it’s Auto-Matt-Ic as in Matt Mullenweg, who embedded his own name into the company name) is a reflection of Matt’s ego. If he fails his investors, he will view himself as a failure, and that’s not acceptable for someone who has literally embedded their ego in their business. Whether or not he has infinite runway, he does not have infinite VC reputation.
While it’s possible he suddenly woke up one day and decided to become greedy and petty, it seems more likely that with the end of zero-percent interest rates, his investors are nagging him to increase his rate of growth of profit accordingly. Otherwise why rock the boat when, as you note, he’s already making money hand over fist? But it’s not rate of return annually that matters to investors, it’s the rate of growth of rate of return that matters, and that’s almost certainly trending negative by now.
I don’t generally take note of HN usernames when commenting, but noted. Certainly that does put him in the unique position of being able to substantively disprove me, if he chooses to!
However, if Automattic is indeed flush with unlimited runway, then the lawsuit is not in contention for any resources needed by the Wordpress project, which lends credence to this being simple market manipulation — i.e. “we have ceased Wordpress development to drive the community and userbase into pressuring WPE to increase investment into Wordpress open source work”, which only works when there are few (or no) serious competitors. It could be a precursor to taking future development of the Wordpress project closed-source, too. We can only guess.
The legal action at issue apparently "diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health." So there must be some limitation to that runway, no?
This is one of those times I wish HN could support GIFs without it becoming unmanageable. The "You do get how that's worse, right?" clip fits right in here.
