@Chip Bennett - Before I say anything else, I should make it clear that I am not Donncha O'Caoimh, the WordPress MU developer, I think you may have us confused, it's an easy mistake to make, so, I always post as "donnacha | WordSkill" to differentiate. Note, too, that my name is Donnacha, his is Donncha - mine is longer.

I didn't mean to come across as condescending but I did mean to come across as angry - because I am. When I questioned your understanding of the GPL, I did so because of this comment:

I am glad to hear Matt admit that he is intentionally conflating the legal construct that is the GPL and the philosophical concerns and ethics of the Free Software “movement”.

Pretty much all the people who have done the heavy lifting in the WordPress project (and the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP projects upon which your installation of WordPress depends) would be appalled and insulted to see you refer to the Free Software movement, with the word movement in inverted commas. By any definition, the Free and Open Source Software movement is, indeed, a movement, one to which people have dedicated their live's work, one which has had a major impact on the evolution of the software industry, one without which the Internet as we know it today would not exist and the GPL has been one of the keystones of that movement.

The Free and Open Source Software movement is not some hare-brained scheme that a bunch of hippies have come up while picking nits out of their hair - this is a movement of countless people, in every country of the world, united by a common vision and the WordPress project emphatically shares that vision.

You may not agree with that vision, but your failure to recognise and acknowledge a bona fide and long-standing movement suggests that you don't understand the history and legacy of the project you are so determined to change. That it not condescension, it is an evidently accurate observation.

You then went on to say:

It is basically Matt saying, implicitly, “I want the WordPress community to adopt the ethics and philosophy of the Free Software movement”. I would *love* for Matt actually to use this terminology, rather than the bogus “spirit of the GPL”.

This is want I meant by hateful and sloppily argued, it is straight out of the Bill O'Reilly playbook: you set up a proposition, that Matt is somehow trying to hide a belief in the ethics and philosophy of the Free Software movement, as if it is his dirty secret and you just want him to come clean, when, in fact, he has been repeatedly, consistently and eloquently espousing FOSS right since the beginning of WordPress.

Again, you can disagree with his position but, please, do not try to spin the argument, we are not morons in the WordPress community, we are people with an interest in and a deep understanding of ideas and meaning, we are not sitting in front of Fox News drinking cheap beer and potato chips, we actually notice when someone uses cheap rhetorical tricks to smear someone else.

I do not mean to level this complaint entirely at you, you are just falling into line with a quite recent increase in rudeness towards Matt and the deliberate misinterpretations of the GPL, orchestrated by a very specific group. I have been around WordPress long enough, and have observed the community closely enough, to know that these memes are being stirred up by a handful of guy with a personal financial interest in using the WordPress eco-system to sell products, usually products that are not very good.

I have nothing against premium themes and plugins, and it is worth noting that the really talented and productive guys, such as Carl Hancock and Brian Gardner, understand and are cool with WordPress and appreciative of the platform that WordPress provides. By comparison, ask yourself, the guys who are moaning loudest about access to WordPress.org, the guys who stir up the most vitriolic attacks against GPL, the nastiest personal attacks on Matt - exactly what have they produced that they are so anxious to sell? If you will look closely, you will notice that they have failed to produce anything worthwhile and now, disappointed and frustrated, are eager to blame their failure on "the system", personified by Matt.

Again, I don't know where you stand in all this, perhaps you are just picking up on and echoing their frustrations - people with a gripe are always louder, it would be easy to mistake a cabal of malcontents as being the community, but they are not. There is a huge, mostly silent majority of WordPress users who don't necessarily have time to hang out on WordPress forums, or to maintain a high profile in blog comments, mainly because they do not have a vested interest in doing so, but they are the real stakeholders and contributors to the WordPress project, you can be pretty sure that they are glad that its leaders are holding firm to the simple philosophy upon which it was founded. Anytime anything worthwhile is created, the hustlers gather, the vultures circle. From time to time, someone has to kick the money changers out of the temple.