[bigiain]

I'd love to see the receipts where Automattic is paying 8% of their revenue to Rasmus Lerdorf or a company he's in control of?

Seems totally fair, right? WordPress is 100% reliant on PHP and getting updates, new features, and security fixes for free, none of which the PHP project is obligated to provide?

Surely Automattic, a company valued at over 7 billion with annual revenues of over 700mil is happily paying Rasmus 50 odd million a year?

No? Why not? Are the rules different for WPEngine and Silver Lake compared to Automattic and Blackrock/Alta Park?

And, you know what? You can't run Wordpress without Linux, Windows, macOS, and maybe a few *BSD operating systems to run it on. I guess Matt's owes Linus and Bill and Tim, and a bunch of BSD project leads another $50mil.