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Comment by dncornholio | Hacker News Reader

My company is also a heavy user of WordPress and never have contributed. We also hide those widgets. Do we need to be blocked as well then?

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Does your company offer a competitor to what Automattic is offering, taking revenues from them, and make 500+ millions in revenues a year? If the answer to those is yes then I’d probably keep quiet before Matt notices you :)

That is a really problematic question to ask. Because remember, Automattic is not the Foundation or the open source project...

so then the question becomes "Why is the Foundation/project hamstringing a competitor to their director's for profit company who is, in theory, and legally should be, independent?"

Is your company building a business with half a billion of dollars in revenue out the uncountable amount of man-hours put into Wordpress development?

We probably made a lot more then that in the past 20 years.

We are talking about yearly revenues here, and something tells me that your company is not in the business of selling services that depend on WordPress code being developed

Seems like you should act as if you will be.

Open source is a gift. There's etiquette involved.

Suppose one of your developers writes on twitter that you don't permit contribution, and you fire that developer on the next day. What reaction do you expect from the people who pay for most of the development?

I keep seeing people refer to this tweet. Can you share a link to it, please?

I'm afraid not. I look at twitter only in incognito mode and don't have any history, and can't find anything now.

Hiding the widgets isn't the main issue. If you infringe the WordPress trademark in commercial use, and ignore any attempt to make it right, and pursue legal action, W.ORG does not have to provide those free services to you.

I'm guessing you are not size of WP Engine and Silver Lake, honest question, if you were, would you want to contribute back to WordPress?

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