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Comment by tomphoolery | Hacker News Reader

> The fact that those boundaries are crossed means that anyone who is in competition with Automattic might have any and all ecosystems that Matt has any control over leveraged against them if they upset Matt or Automattic in any way.

There was never a boundary in the first place if it's the same guy doing both things. WordPress has always had this veneer of "community-driven", which is what they hide behind when people get their sites exploited, but Automattic really holds all the keys here. Just because Matt replies with an `@wordpress.org` email vs. an `@wordpress.com` email doesn't mean he's a different person all of a sudden.

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If that’s the case, I’d like to hear from Matt about this. I’ve known him for years, and I don’t think he is unaware of conflicts like these. In fact I’ve seen him be deeply thoughtful about complex problems in the past. He’s not perfect (who is?), but he really does try.

Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.

Seems like the kind of situation where only one person can answer.

Am I off?

> Given that he has been pretty reasonable about stuff like this in the past, I don’t find myself inclined to ascribe bad intent until I hear from him personally.

there is a level of actions that are so bad that intent doesnt actually matter anymore. i would say matt has crossed that line here.

ThePrimeagen just did an interview with him, the video is also available on youtube now too.

Not the best interview IMO since prime didn't have much time to prepare questions / topics, and so he is very much "firing from the hip" but you'll get to hear matt go into detail about this topic.

video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6F0PgMcKWM

His interview with Theo https://youtu.be/OUJgahHjAKU

Compare and contrast with the OpenAI old board vs sama drama the other day. And the end result of non-profit being steered by the for-profit entity.

You could also draw parallels from Drupal's death spiral that kicked off when (at the behest of corporate clients) Aquia decided to pivot to "large core" architecture and tossed the bulk of the community overboard in the process.

> they hide behind when people get their sites exploited

It's all in the GPL under "no warranty" and the license is attached to the WP source.

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