Automattic spends about 4,000 hours/week on WordPress, or about 100 people. This is a big investment, and more than all other companies on the first "pledge" pa

Automattic spends about 4,000 hours/week on WordPress, or about 100 people. This is a big investment, and more than all other companies on the first "pledge" page put together (which is 2,539 hours).[1] That of course doesn't mean they're above criticism or anything, but you also can't really ignore that an enormous chunk of development is funded by Automattic (i.e. WordPress.com). In return of doing all this work, they get quite a lot of power over the project. That's kind of how it works everywhere: when I was a scout leader the people who were there every weekend, spent a lot of time on admin stuff, etc. etc. had more "power" than the people who would occasionally show up and help out. Or to put it in another way: if you contribute a few useful PRs to one of my projects, and then you proceed to be a dick to me (or others) then I'll ban you. Even if that's outside of the GitHub repo (like, say, Hacker News) because at some point I'll be "fuck that person". Yes, your contributions were useful. But also: I did 90% of the work here, and your ten PRs are not on the same level. It might be different if you (or WP-Engine) had spent roughly the same amount of time, or at least roughly on the same order of magnitude. But that's not the case here – the gap is huge. So I do hold them to different standards, because one put their money where their mouth is, and the other didn't. All of that said, I'm not sure if Mullenweg's actions are all that wise. But also: I don't have all the details, so I find it difficult to judge. --- [1]: As an aside, I don't know how they actually measure this or how accurate these numbers are. But I haven't seen anyone – including WP-Engine – dispute them, so I will assume they're reasonably accurate.