The marketing machine around Matt, WP.com, and OSS is just incredible. Automattic has taken nearly a BILLION dollars in VC money (including 300m most recently from Salesforce) to essentially execute a hostile takeover of open of source WordPress. Automattic forced their rewrite of WordPress (a Squarespace clone written in React) on the community and it has been a disaster, leading to many resignations of long-time contributors and their replacement with paid Automattic employees: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gutenberg/reviews/
Automattic/WordPress is like any other VC-backed venture looking for their exit, except this one is doing off the back of a once-vibrant OSS community. The open source connection is a fairy tale (and apparently powerful marketing tool). They will not save the Internet.
Automattic/WordPress is like any other VC-backed venture looking for their exit, except this one is doing off the back of a once-vibrant OSS community. The open source connection is a fairy tale (and apparently powerful marketing tool). They will not save the Internet.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automattic