FWIW, this is one of the best articles I’ve read on the matter, which lists all of the updates since publication in chronological order at the top.
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It’s sad. The people fighting have so many mutual friends but no one can de-escalate this.
I’d been thinking about moving away from (open source, self-hosted) Wordpress for my personal web site and the recent rumpus pushed me to do it.
There was increasing (and I think deliberate) blurring between the open source (.org) and the commercial arms (.com) of Wordpress, both with Mullenweg firmly in charge. This became most obvious when I tried jetpack as a way of allowing me to do a couple of things (like being able to publish from various kinds of offline writing) and realised that the cost was that the commercial Wordpress would make a complete copy of my site on their commercial one, have complete access to my content and that they reserved various rights to do things with that data. I also found it would redirect things like searches for plugins into the commercial space without me realising. It felt very creepy and was creeping towards taking over completely, not to mention the inbuilt hard-sell that jetpack (and even the open source Wordpress) inserted into my web site’s back end. I couldn’t edit a post without getting all the updates from Mullenweg and how they could make my life easier if I just moved my site to their service. At some point soon, I could see myself having to pay Automattic to use a site I had built with open source and hosted independently for years.
Automattic also own and run Day One and Pocketcasts (and other things). They are very good at taking over what started as passion projects and open source and turning them into “cash cows”: where the product becomes a service and the service stays pretty good but loses its edge (IMHO). I’m happier outside that world.
I have been wondering about DayOne off the back of Matt Mullenweg’s actions and it concerns me greatly. 
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Another take on the issues here:
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I don’t really know the ins and outs of Wordpress (I used it briefly years ago, was overkill for my simple needs) or the dot org vs dot com delineation, but Mullenweg comes off like a total d-bag in some of his comments.
One of his posts he ripped into DHH from Basecamp, who I also am not a huge fan of, but it was weird and petty.
If you have managed hosting, they take care of the updates. But if you self-host Ghost you need to keep it updated yourself. But Ghost is definately being actively developed so there are updates.
“I happily provide WordPress.org services to literally every other host,” Mullenweg says. There is “no requirement to give back. WordPress will be open-source forever and ever, and so there will never be any legal requirement to give back.” But WordPress does still “request” that companies contribute something . “It’s better for WordPress if they give back.”
(Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’ - The Verge)
“I would sure hate for something to happen to your business, like a fire or something…” Nope. No shakedown here.
I always liked Mullenweg even though it felt like his ego was bigger than most in the valley (and that’s saying something). But the way he’s treated his employees through this has me slowly leaving some of my favorite Automatic apps. I switched from Pocket Casts to Castro this week just to give it another try, and I’ve been playing with Apple Journal the last few weeks in lieu of Day One.
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