What?

WordPress was a fork of B2 and quickly intended to make money.

Matt and Automattic bought into WPE. They were the ones who sold their shares to the Private Equity firm that now owns it!

The only other board member of the Foundation is ... drum roll ... the Managing Partner of another Private Equity firm, that Matt himself appointed.

All his hand wringing about PE is to distract from the simple fact that he has repeatedly been an asshole through this process, and it's not because he "reached his breaking point" as an open source developer. This is so apologistic it's not funny.

He reached a breaking point as a CEO, because he made a horrible business decision to buy Tumblr, which has been nothing but a money pit, ever since.

Since then, MATT's for profit business has had this boat anchor around it, so he's looking for extra cash.

That's why he demanded their royalties be paid to Automattic, his for profit company, not the open source project.

> by people buying into RMS-like visions of the future.

Horseshit. People with RMS-like visions for the future don't see the commercial potential for an open source project, immediately spin up a Foundation with themselves as President, and immediately grant their own for-profit company a perpetual, exclusive and irrevocable commercial use license for said open source project. (They may however release self-congratulatory press releases talking about how they are champions of open source for assigning ownership of the project to their Foundation while neglecting to mention the licensing that they[1] signed off on, that very same day.)

You have apparently fully bought into the narrative.

> making angry demands on volunteers and small teams

What "angry demands" has WPEngine made of the project? I'd love to hear of at least one.

[1] I say 'they' but really, the licensing was signed for the Foundation by "Matt Mullenweg, President", and for Automattic by "Matt Mullenweg, President and CEO".