I think Ethics is something thats hard to debate, because everyone has a different viewpoint based on their personal experiences in life. It's also difficult some times to realise internally when we become hypocritical to our own ethics.

"Doing X is bad (as long as it's done by other people)."
(Tony Robbins refers to this as "Lying with Integrity" because you're not intentionally being dishonest, its just your viewpoint)

So far the consensus here has been that it's bad for someone to promote or discuss the services of their employer without being transparent about it... Cool, I agree.

Can I ask how many people thought that when WPtavern had been owned by Matt for a year (+?) without telling anyone? Or when, completely unrelated of course, the non-WPtavern news sites were taken off the News feed in your WP Dashboard at the same time? Didn't see too many "ethical" posts rocking around WPtavern then...

I genuinely don't think anything intentionally underhanded or nefarious has gone on. I just really worry when people start questioning ethics about certain things, but not others, especially when we're dealing with something as global as WordPress (or any other of the OSS CMS's).

Maybe we should discuss "best practices" and "guidelines". Ethics is too much of an argument about moral philosophy :)