The "board of directors" you all are talking about is called the WordPress Foundation. It's the open source foundation (currently pursuing nonprofit status) that is behind WordPress.org, and while it is closely linked into Automattic because Automattic is WordPress-centric in its business and many people involved in the development of WordPress.org and related projects also work on operations with the company, .org IS separate is managed by the foundation, along with:

- WordPress plugins
- WordPress Themes
- BuddyPress

http://wordpressfoundation.org is currently experiencing a server error, but you can check the Google cache for more information.

The conclusions being drawn and the lengths people are going here are getting to be ridiculous. (Getting a "check" as a community member from WP.org funds, which, as mentioned above, is not for profit and used to keep the foundation running? Come ON.) You all can piece together as many conspiracy theories and "Evil Automattic runs the whole show" whines as you like. In fact, it looks to be quite a lot of fun! However, the truth is that Matt barely took any money the first couple years so it would mostly go to developers, people who had earned their cred. He really wanted to "give back" and what you describe, though unfortunately not possible, is his dream come true, not a joke.

I tend to lean towards the side of rational thought. You're not entirely correct on what's going on here. Sorry. However, if you're really that unhappy, MovableType would LOVE your business. And so would Drupal! Marvelous thing, free will. I don't think many will miss the tears and noise.