In reply to Steve Wilkinson.

Steve, your point re: "if not WP, then what?" is certainly well taken. And at 25%-ish market penetration WP is certainly the biggest ... as in ... no-one else is seriously worth considering id size (i.e., potential support channels) is your concern—and it should be.

But all those small players (I'm NOT talking about the Joomlas and Drupals of the world; I mean home-grown tools from Apple/Google/Microsoft, when , not if they get their acts together) make 50% seem pretty unlikely. And the Squarespace-like tools ... there are about a dozen viable ones now, and even if we accept that they are very bad ideas for portability purposes, 1% x 12 "being there" because people don't understand the stakes supports my no-way-50%-happenstheory.

REST is the big variable here, and you seem to understand/accept my premise. WP has always been made of three things: PHP code, MySQL database, and the backend that one installs using "the famous 5 minute install". REST essentially makes the back-end unnecessary, although in truth anything that could write to the database always made it so; it was just too much work pre-REST.

So now we're left with PHP (oops ... maybe not ... ) and a MySQL database which ultimately is constructed in a way that is in no way unique and, by nature, not special.

So none of it is remotely proprietary and in REST Automattic has lowered the barriers to accessing a pre-WP-formatted environment without using "WP" to the point that it's almost trivial. THAT'S FINE. In fact, it's great and certainly strongly within the spirit of open-source. But I believe it to be all but a certainty that the fork between the .COM and .ORG implementations is coming.

Which is where the community thing gets hairy.

When we launched http://wordpress.answerguy.com in its original location, I got quite the lesson in how the community works. Without comment as to whether I should have approached things differently, it's clearly incredibly insular.

What I learned that was FASCINATING is that the community—over 99% of whom have no direct stake in WordPress (i.e., Automattic) was ferociously protective of ... the whole thing. Fork the .ORG and .COM worlds and there becomes very little reason for that ferocity to persist.

So the .ORG folks (that's most of "us", right?) are developing things that are less compatible with the .COM part of things than ever, and the chasm only continues to grow over time. And now we get back to my original point: Automattic is trying to push people, way more aggressively than before, to their managed hosting platform.

But that platform, now at odds with distinct from what's good for the community is ... oh wait, I just said it, didn't I?

The one rallying cry that remains (like, the ONE) is that Automattic is thus far continuing to talk and act "open source". My concern is that the phrase has become hollow and deflective of reality.