[FireBeyond]

> the pretense that he was doing it for "security reasons" because there was an exploit (every single part of everything about wordpress has an exploit in a random month) shows that he thought he was doing something unjustifiable

Not to mention the threats posted online to other plugin developers, "we can and will find an exploit in your plugin and do exactly the same to you if we want" indicated it had very little to do with security. I'm sure he had Automattic employees pulled onto finding even the most trivial of exploits just to be able to do this.

> they'd probably have backed down and started contributing

WPE contributes probably in the seven digit a year range to WP. The very conference that Matt went "nuclear" at was sponsored by WPE to the tune of $75K (and for insult on injury, they were denied the ability to attend, and I believe all references to them were removed, but the money was kept).