[dabinat]

I feel like the dodgy part isn’t the forking. Any open source project can be forked at any time by anyone. The dodgy part is them automatically switching existing users to their fork.

To use your McDonald’s analogy, it’s like specifically ordering a Coke and McD’s secretly switching it to a McCoke without you noticing.

[outsomnia]

As I wrote elsewhere, this is no different from a project deciding to incorporate a third party's functionality into the core. Either way whoever provides the plugin, you trust the provider to provide the core, if you now think they are going to do bad things, there is nothing they can do in the plugin that they couldn't do in the core without all this drama.

It seems the "perceptual framing" that is being engineered about this, that Automattic and its leader should be cancelled, is not about technical issues.