>Automattic-sponsored core committer Jorge Costa

>Fueled-sponsored core committer Peter Wilson

>Bluehost-sponsored core committer Jonathan Desrosiers

>Human Made-sponsored core committer John Blackbourn

This is a terrifying way to describe people.

What is a "connector" in this context?

Ok, I think Matt’s goofy for various reasons. From just what this article says, I think he’s right on this one. This is my understanding of it:

* The dev team has a disagreement about putting one of the company’s own projects on the available plugins carousel or whatever inside their main product.

* They eventually decide not to.

* The CEO says “this has been an important part of our product for 20 years. It’s silly that we’re even debating this”, and put it there anyway.

And that’s about it? Based only on what I read here, there wasn’t any compelling engineering reason not to do a thing, and the CEO made a product decision to do it. That sounds like something I’ve heard 1,000 times at different shops and I’m not sure what the problem is.

Perhaps I’m misreading this, and the main point isn’t “CEO overrides valiant dev team”, but “CEO makes recalcitrant dev team stop bikeshedding”.

I say this out of no love for Matt’s… “interesting”… decision making the last couple of years. This sounds reasonable to me though.

It says a lot about what's been going on in the Wordpress ecosystem lately that I had never heard of Mullenweg before maybe a year or two ago, and now I immediately see his name and think "What's he done this time?" Probably very frustrating for many people who actually use the platform, but as someone who doesn't, it's almost morbidly fascinating watching the continued drama and wondering if and when any of it ends up hurting the bottom line enough that something changes. I've joked to my wife before that if they end to running into issues and sell Tumblr, and it follows the trend of how much cheaper it was the second time, it might mean we could just buy it ourselves and run it.

I guess I'm confused about Matt wanting to "right the ship" so to speak, while also shoving this through. (Idgaf, it's a product call ultimately)

But it seems the clean, sustainable, long-term way to do this was to have the akismet plugin simply self-register. Why was this hack easier than just doing that?

Akismet makes money for Automattic / Matt.

Comment spam is terrible and will continue to get worse.

Decent alternatives exist.

Increasing the visibility of Akismet should help increase revenue.

This is 100% a financial move.