In reply to David Coveney.

Interesting argument if a bit self-promotional. It's helped clarify my own thoughts. It would be very kind David, if both you and WP VIP services could more actively share back to the community which nourishes you. I'm not sure if Human Made, Moove or Crowd Favorite are hoarding software so I won't include them in that list.

Where I work we do share our core code. And that's a matter of policy. What we don't want to share we don't tag with GPL (and have been banned from years of WordCamp presentations for a single non-GPL pro plugin - even though the free version is GPL). Private code hoarding is apparently acceptable, even encouraged, both technically and socially. Strange world we live in.

A shared distribution which is more focused on secure publishing would be a fabulous project. It would need leadership though and from people who are publicly minded. Our BusinessPress project leads in this direction (providing one place to turn on and off all the hidden preferences in WordPress, basic branding and basic fail2ban security integration) but is more focused on SMB sites and not publishing workflows specifically, although BP could easily provide the foundation for publishing improvements. WordPress should be about sharing code and not hoarding it. Sharing is where we all started. Sharing is what makes all this possible.