Duh. Of course Automattic has designed their platform so that it benefits them, and of course the rules they set developers don't apply to them. It's their platform and ecosystem. If you think they're being unfair, go play somewhere else. I honestly don't understand rants like this. It's like people think that they're entitled to something just because they want it. If you can't make money on Wordpress because of Matt's restrictive stance on paid plugins and themes, then you can't make money doing that. Go do something else!

Life isn't fair, and business sure as hell isn't. Business is about tilting the odds in your favor, not making sure everybody is one big happy family.

Can't comment on the article, since I don't know that much about the Wordpress scene. But man, the author is a whiny critic type. Here's just a few from his last 10 articles:

"Twitter Peaks To Media Overkill, Is Real Time Search Dead", "Comment Systems Comparison Update: Disgusted With Disqus", "Swoopo May Be Most Profitable, Ingenius Online Business. But Is It Legal?", "eBay’s Problem: Biting The Hand That Feeds It"

Yeah. This guys appears to be a loser who creates nothing of value, and points out holes in other people's creations. One of the hardest things about trying to do something of value is learning to mostly dismiss people like him. It's still a challenge - no ones like to be criticized. But wow, it's easy to talk a lot of trash when you're not doing anything. One of my favorite quotes -

Teddy Roosevelt:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Please tell me I’m wrong about your understanding of the GPL and your intentions. It’s probably no mistake that Matt doesn’t want to acknowledge such issues. For it he did, he would have to acknowledge the fact that Automattic, a commercial entity that owns WordPress, exploits the GPL to promote it’s distribution, uses plugin and theme developers work to build upon WordPress, and then uses the GPL as a barrier to prevent anyone except Automattic from benefiting financially from the work.

How is this any different from what Sleepycat and MySQL do? I thought this was the playbook for open source business models.

Okay, I think this post is ridiculous for many reasons. The major reason being the author just doesn't understand the point.

When he talks about 200 themes were removed back in 2007 from the wordpress theme directory, most of the themes that were removed were sponsored(or spammy) themes. wordpress.org is is the website for the opensourced GPL'd project wordpress, there is no reason for them to host themes that run in contrary to that philosophy. The idea is to create trust in the hosted wordpress themes and plugins, for people who care they know if they go to wordpress.org, everything they download is GPL'd they are free to use, free to modify and free to redistribute.

I don't see that the onus is on Automattic to support any other agenda but their own, they are a business and the ultimate goal is to make money(for themselves).

That being said, the idea of a wordpress theme/plugin marketplace is a fine one, but as many people have already said in this thread it would be easy enough idea for automattic to take as their own. I would find it hard to believe the guys at automattic are stupid so if it doesn't exist already, there is probably a reason(ie/ profit margins are too low to spend the time developing the service, not enough demand, etc.)

Few things embitter people more than being this close to money they can't have.

Amazing. The author complains of not having a business model, spends most of the post describing the one he would like to be given by someone else, and yet never makes the connection between the two.

I'm glad this post was written and I hope more light gets shed on this.

I've seen many people who are naive about GPL and how it relates to themes and plugins.

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