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Comment by wise_young_man | Hacker News Reader

Last I checked Automattic is a privately held for profit company. One could argue that it’s a private equity too. Just using different words to twist a narrative.

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This is not the same. Private equity extracts as an investment, Automattic is an ecosystem participant (that happens to be privately held) that actively contributes to the community. That doesn’t mean Matt hasn’t taken things too far (I leave that to be determined by civil courts and the Wordpress community, no dog in the fight myself), but there is a difference, and it is very important to clearly delineate who is receiving benefit for value realized economically.

not trying to be controversial, and I know some private investment firms are understandably not well regarded, but there are plenty you don’t hear about that are quite pleasant to work with

Automattic is now attempting to extract an investment, and in a much worse way than WPE ever did.

I would argue that attempting to strong arm a competitor into paying for your open source product and then doing all of this when they won’t is way farther down the late stage capitalism road than most private equity companies.

That’s probably mostly because the private equity folks are just better at extracting money without causing an international scene. Matt’s ineptitude doesn’t make it categorically different, though.

I can understand the desire to prevent freeloading, but not agree with the methods to encourage better behavior. Economic systems are hard and imperfect.

> Automattic is an ecosystem participant

They were, until the CEO started burning decades of goodwill. At this point I'm looking at what I should do to get off Automattic for my website, I'm legit scared plugin developers are going to get spooked.

https://thewpminute.com/private-equity-and-the-soul-of-wordp...

Good to know, thanks!

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