I’d recommend reading this illogical post from Duncan at Techcrunch and then rally around Matt in the comments section.
After reading all of Duncan’s and Matt’s comments I had to throw my two-cents in,
Duncan: I don’t see your point. You mention that Matt can’t have it both ways but by writing this article and placing *your* issues into a “gray area” you’re rewarding your terms with two-ways to lean; neither for or against, making you’re actually opinion irrelevant. And isn’t this just an opinion piece? I don’t see any facts–that are correct–, it’s all lambasting for self-promotion, similar to your friends at Vallywag.
No matter how many times you’ll be told that your statements are false and irrational you’ll always be clinging to that “gray area” message.
In your response to the question you pose to Matt, “WTF did someone do to you BTW? Where did this hatred come from?”. What exactly made you criticize Matt–and by association the entire wordpress community of developers and supporters–? All without one ounce of research of how to properly run a business through OSS, the business model of automattic and how Matt runs it, the history of wordpress or even get to know how spam works? Instead of reporting you glued your self-important thoughts together and lambasted the very person AND the community that built the infrastructure for you to get paid from.
I find this post so disturbing as D’s trying to associate taking advantage users by placing paid text ads on released code is the same as Matt providing a service through Wordpress.com and Akismet. He really needs to step back and learn a few things, specifically:
The Blogroll: it’s there as an example for users, is easily managable and provides a credit to the hard
working developer community. Since Matt works very hard at wordpress.org he deserves it like the others. Lastly how does he make money off of those links again?
Akismet: Is entirely a service. Yes the free Akismet users contribute to the whole but they also benefit is the entire community. Matt is not holding back the perfect solution to stop all spam for every wordpress user, he’s just providing an added value to the paid users of Akismet because it includes a service level that the free addition could not support.
Wordpress.com: Charging for an extra service level through Wordpress.com doesn’t leverage the community nor the code-base. It’s a service level agreement that you’re paying for, similar to Akismet.
Update: Another comment.