I think the only free rider is Automattic. How much value do they derive from the WordPress trademark that we’ve all built up over the years without paying anything?

Automattic is also the largest user of GoDaddy’s free site building plugin CoBlocks.

The premise of this article also seems off. Automattic is a WordPress company. GoDaddy is not, WordPress is just a relatively small part of their business. That’d be like calling Google a domain company.