[snowwrestler]

I wonder if this sort of thing is ultimately going to shrink the market share of Wordpress.

Drupal has a similar setup where the founder of the open source project also founded a company (Acquia) and took many $millions of investment. It created a lot of confusion in the market about what would be the terms of competition… how benevolent the open source “overlord” would remain.

As Acquia grew its footprint, I knew quite a few companies who diverted investment from Drupal into other CMS ecosystems. Ironically Wordpress was the beneficiary of a lot of that. Within a couple years every “Drupal agency” I was aware of was doing Wordpress too. And every “Drupal host” had expanded into Wordpress or general hosting. Look around… Drupal ain’t dead but it’s not spreading anymore either. I know there were other factors, but I also know Acquia was a factor, at least commercially.

Investors and entrepreneurs need a clear runway in front of them to feel comfortable making large investments. Matt seems to be planting himself in the Wordpress runway, at minimum as a gatekeeper and possibly as a straight-up obstacle. He’s trying to wear the open source hat as he does this, but everyone can see the Automattic hat too. Even if he is doing this with the best of intentions, I think it will not have a positive effect overall.