In reply to Justin Tadlock.

I think everyone accepts that what Matt proposed makes sense. What sparked controversy for most people was summed up by Ben

"Automattic must be recognized for the significant resources they have provided to date, although even Matt acknowledges in his blog post that at 277 people, Automattic has less than 14 people (5%) dedicated to the WordPress Open Source Project.

Automattic’s contribution may be waning (even if only in percentage terms as the rest of the non-open source part of the business expands), and Matt is rallying others to step up to fill the void/expand the edges. But with that comes the discussion on how that broadened contribution extends into the leadership of the overall direction of WordPress itself."

For me it was a rather harsh notion of what contribution was that is not taking into account the diversity in the community about which I wrote more here :