[_ck_]

People don’t write software to see their name in lights.

I think the point is being missed by some who haven’t kept up with bbPress history.

bbPress wasn’t invented by Matt to create a better forum for the masses.

It was invented to serve the needs of Automattic needing (faster) support forums.

It just happens to be open source so others can improve it, write plugins for it, etc.

You’ll never have “certified plugins”, that would have no useful purpose to Automattic. On the flip side I would never have written a single plugin if I thought it was being held to some kind of standard, I wrote them for “fun”, to see if I could do it, or to show others it was possible.

Releasing a product as open source is a way for business to get additional labor on their products for free by encouraging adoption. That’s not a criticism, that’s how it works in general. Matt used code from other open source projects so he’s motivated to also share his projects as open source.

Sure there are some projects that are made from scratch to try to serve the greater good. But there’s no reward for that, you can never please more than a handful of people with whatever you try to do, given how many different opinions and experiences there are in any community.

Some of the wishes expressed in this topic were expressed last year, the year before that and will be said next year and the year after that. Don’t use bbPress if any of those issues are important to you, because WordPress has been around for six+ years and it still has those issues and always will.