In the WordPress ecosystem, there was a lot of variation around "press."

The GPL is a license for the source code to be open and free. No one has ever implied it defines anything else about how the software is used or interacts wit the world.

So what that they allegedly lied by saying and marketing they were giving back while not actually doing it? That's like saying you're cleaning a river while secretly dumping toxic sludge in it.

So what on degrading the experience? Imagine WordPress was a car, say a BMW Mini, and you're a dealer that buys Minis but then resell them without air-conditioning, safety features like airbags, or a dozen other things a reasonable person would expect from a Mini. But then you spend tens of millions of dollars marketing it as a Mini, actually charging more than most other dealers, but people get in and say this seems a bit odd, basic things don't work. Does that degrade the Mini brand and trademark? Quite a bit. (Again, trademarks have nothing to do with the GPL.) What you call something and how you market it matters, that's why we have large government agencies and laws to protect against this.

I've heard you say before "Change anything in WordPress, there's nothing you can do that I can't undo." Guess what gets broken when revisions are completely turned off: undo. If you want it back on you have to contact customer support for permission. For something you paid 20+/mo for and maybe even thought it was the official WordPress Engine thing.

Longer context: At Automattic, we take very seriously the sustainability of the promises we make to users of our products, including serving trillions of free requests to WP.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and many other services over the years.

We want every product to be self-sustaining, so it doesn't rely on my benevolence, but instead has an engine of value creation and capture that can be something we continue to maintain and support for decades to come. We really do think long-term, as evidenced by our 100-year plan on WP.com.

The Pocket Casts business model is similar to that of many other products, featuring a free version with ads and a paid upgrade with additional features and no ads, much like Spotify, YouTube, and others.

As a matter of engineering ethics, I don't believe in "lifetime" purchases, and we don't create new ones at Automattic, but we have honored the legacy people who paid a one-time fee to Pocket Casts when they were a startup with basically what we call a "Champions" account, which is a lifetime you-get-the-best-of-whatever-we-sell deal. There are only a few thousand of these folks, so it seemed better to try and make it more of a gift than attempt to migrate people to what is actually a sustainable business model, which is a recurring subscription.

We open-sourced Pocket Casts after acquiring it because I believe that in the podcasting world, it's vital to have an open-source alternative to proprietary distribution networks.

One challenging thing about WordCamps is you get people coming who are completely non-technical and just want to blog, all the way to hardcore devs who want interesting technical content. There were some great talks at WordCamp US, if you check it out you'll see how we tried to balance that.

You can look at reviews of the event, people had a good time. International visitors have been down due to political and immigration issues outside of our control.

Being there on the ground, it did feel a little spread out, lots of pockets of people connecting, but the venue was pretty huge. We'll try to keep things tighter in Phoenix next year. The upcoming WordCamp in India looks like it will be double the size of any previous ones.

Maybe you think Coca-cola should taste a certain way, and want to sell that to consumers, but without commercial rights to the trademark you can't do that under the Coca-cola brand, you have to call it something else.

We've invested a ton in products like WordPress Studio, which let you run unlimited local copies of WordPress with however many plugins, themes, etc you want.