In reply to Johnny.

I believe you are paid for your time lambasting anyone who voices any objection to Jetpack’s borg-like behaviour by Automattic. I’m writing on my free time, so please pardon me the brevity of my reply.

I'm paid on salary (so there is no 'on the clock' 'off the clock'), but this isn't any task that I've been assigned or asked to do. I'm responding on top of all my other duties, so this is equally my own time spent replying to you here.

George, the whole point is that Jetpack is making API services out of items which could be executed directly (and even better) from the plugin itself.

Okay, for starters, do you even know what Elasticsearch is? I keep mentioning Latent Semantic Analysis, do you have any concept of what that is, or how difficult it is to do? You can learn a bit by reading up on the ElasticPress plugin that the fine folks over at 10up have put together -- but that's not feasible for most users, as it requires running your own Elasticsearch instance. So we run a large instance in the cloud to make users lives easier.

If you find any 'Junior Developer' that can build performant, solid, latent semantic analysis engine in PHP that can run well on a $5/month shared host against a MySQL database, please let me know, because that would be worth tens of millions easily.

Yes, remote sites can post directly to FB, Twitter, etc with the right API keys, but that's the trick -- they need to go to each platform, set up a _developer_ account, get api keys ... a lot of added confusion that most folks don't want to do or have the understanding of how to do. So we just extend the Publicize infrastructure that's already been in place for WordPress.com sites to support self-hosted Jetpack sites as well. We make user's lives easier and less complicated.

If Automattic wanted to play fair (and it’s clear Matt/Jetpack/VC’s don’t), you’d unbundle Jetpack and let each plugin compete on its own merits.

If you don't like a feature in Jetpack, you don't have to enable it. That's why we built it modularly. But as for why they are bundled, I wrote this post a while back -- I really need to finish part two of it, but: http://stephanis.info/2015/01/31/why-jetpack-isnt-a-collection-of-plugins-part-the-first/ should give you some understanding of why Jetpack is bundled, and it's not to try to take over the world.

One could take the entire Jetpack apart piece by piece as unnecessary serviceware. As Jetpack belongs to Automattic, unfortunately, the playing field is not level and community objections are steamrolled.

We build it, and we build it as we believe best benefits the community -- But as it's GPL, you're welcome to spin aspects off to standalone plugins, as some folks already have: https://wptavern.com/jp-bot-the-silent-bot-behind-the-jetpack-module-extraction-plugins -- note that those have not been 'steamrolled'.