[fbnlsr]

I'm probably wrong here, but my tinfoil hat take is that Matt has seen how well Taylor Otwell is doing with Laravel and he wants a piece of that cake. Granted they're doing pretty good with wordpress.com hosting, but they'd have so much more money if they licenced plugins and features the way Laravel does.

[FireBeyond]

That might be part of it, though I think the more pressing boat anchor around Automattic's neck is the money pit that Tumblr is, for what seems like very little return.