[akuchling]

You're motte-and-baileying here, since you began with "WordPress has been built by people employed by Matt either via Automattic or via his other entities", and are now writing "WordPress would not be where it is today if it depended on free labour." The second sentence is unquestionably true, but doesn't mean that "every piece of Wordpress was produced by paid labour".

[that_guy_iain]

> You're motte-and-baileying here,

I disagree. They're fundamentally the same at the core. The argument at hand is whether or not Matt is where he is because of free labour. And the answer to that is a clear no. Automattic would not be a multi-billion dollar company because WordPress powers so much of the internet that Automattic gets lots of hosting customers. WordPress has such a big market share because Matt has invested heavily in the open-source version of WordPress.

And since the argument is based on wether of not Matt is where he is because of free labour the other person needs to prove that he is. I can't prove a negative. I can prove that nearly all the top contributors to the project have been paid by an entity related to Matt.

While you've attempted to frame the argument as something else, I believe that would be considered a strawman fallacy.