In reply to Alec Kinnear.

Jason, I don't think without naming names publicly progress can be made. I understand it's more politic to divide the cake behind closed doors but to my mind lacking grievously in the transparency to which an open source project should aspire. Otto's active presence in the comments here is a comfort, as he is one of the principal arbiters (and authors) of these rules.

To be honest, as much as I like Postmatic and believe at your current price point you are offering tremendous value to even the medium traffic WordPress site, Postmatic falls into another category undermining real OSS and independent web publishing: serviceware. I.e. instead of just letting my server handle the hosting in a freestanding way, the site owner is obliged to sign up and share all user data with you and cannot just move the data back to his or her own hosting.

I know the plugin moderators at WordPress.org have their own ideas about serviceware while Automattic has their own very liberal notions on serviceware. In your favour, the loophole in OSS and GPL2 which Automattic are exploiting is the one you've chosen Jason. Hence you are unlikely to run into any issues, as it would shut down the main commercial plays of the project's owner (well sponsor at this point).

Sorting out fair play in the commercial realm will decide whether WordPress remains a viable long term independent publishing tool or becomes just another paid CMS like those which it replaced ten years ago. What we are debating here are existential questions for those of us deeply invested in WordPress.