Poor chap Matt Mullenweg is being thoroughly grilled everywhere since he was caught in the act of playing dirty tricks with links hidden in the WordPress.org home page and pointing to pages of dubious morality, targeting high-paying keywords and whose only purpose was to gather money through AdSense ads.
It's not a pretty sight. I don't find anything wrong with using ads to raise some money that will be used, purportedly, to pay some of WordPress' development and hosting costs. What I don't like is the way this has been done.
I won't even go into how spamming search engines is evil, no less evil than spamming mailboxes or blog comments. That's quite obvious.
What's particularly sad however, is the complete lack of transparence. If you're a developer who has ever developed a plugin or contributed a bugfix to WordPress, wouldn't you feel betrayed?
Was the money promised by those slimy nachos so much that it couldn't have been raised by honest-to-god, relevant ads? I'm pretty sure Matt could have raised a decent amount of money using ads properly. With a website that ranks 4,207th, according to Alexa, in terms of traffic, you can probably earn a good income and keep it all for yourself instead of getting only a flat fee, even if the ads are not paying as much as for insurance, credit cards, debt consolidation or viagra.
Since Matt is almost exactly half my age, I don't want to be too harsh. Who's not done something terribly stupid in his youth? I'm sure he'll regret this and reform his ways. Unfortunately for him, the web, an Google in particular, have very good memory, so this episode won't be forgotten so easily.
Well, Wordpress is very used worldwide so we will have to accept the internet with the advantasges and flaws of that blogging system.