Update:
Every­one, Please under­stand that this not about WordPress the soft­ware, or WordPress developers, or even WordPress Inc. It is about Matt Mul­len­weg allow­ing someone else to game Google’s search engine on the WordPress.org site.

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I feel I have to com­ment on the cur­rent WordPress story build­ing over the ‘dis­cov­ery’ that Matt has been using the wordpress.org domain to host thou­sands of specially-written art­icles designed to attract high pay­ing Google Adsense adverts, and their out­go­ing links gain­ing high page rank from WordPress.org’s own page rank.
Dou­gal Camp­bell has writ­ten a reasoned response to the story break­ing. It is most unfor­tu­nate that Matt is cur­rently on vaca­tion in Europe, but Jonas has replied quite reas­on­able. Jonas is also say­ing he will answer anyone’s ques­tions 24×7 which is most gen­er­ous of him.
I will also quote Andrew’s open­ing disclaimer:

Dis­claimer. I’m hes­it­ant to even write about this, know­ing the web’s fond­ness for angry mob justice, but I feel like it’s an import­ant issue that needs to be addressed. My one request: please be calm and rational. WordPress is a great pro­ject, and Matt is a good guy. Think before pil­ing on the hate­m­ail and flames.

I sus­pect that Matt is now aware of the situ­ation as the pages seemed to have dis­ap­peared, or else someone trus­ted has taken them down.

It’s worth not­ing that Matt already respon­ded to a query on the sup­port for­ums about this in Feb­ru­ary saying:

The con­tent in /articles is essen­tially advert­ising by a third party that we host for a flat fee. I’m not sure if we’re going to con­tinue it much longer, but we’re com­mit­ted to this month at least, it was basic­ally an exper­i­ment. How­ever around the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary dona­tions were going down as expenses were ramp­ing up, so it seemed like a good way to cover everything. The Adsense on those pages is not ours and I have no idea what they get on it, we just get a flat fee. The money is used just like dona­tions but more spe­cific­ally it’s been going to the business/trademark expenses so it’s not entirely out of my pocket anymore.

My opin­ion? I say, let’s not make a moun­tain out of a mole hill till we have all the facts. It sounds very much like Matt has made dubi­ous decision for all the right reas­ons. But I believe the only thing one can con­sider Matt may have done wrong here is host­ing these art­icles on wordpress.org. Host­ing them at all I don’t have a prob­lem with: It is one way that could be used to help pay for the enorm­ous host­ing costs he must have. There are art­icles out there explain­ing exactly how to do this on your own site.

Matt has my sup­port, he has done a huge amount for this pro­ject. Far, far more than I have. I hope he can sort this one without to much fal­lout. The fact that he has already been open about it stands in his favour.

update:As Dr Dave poin­ted out in the com­ments, Matt didn’t respond to the forum post until Andy said he was going pub­lic with the story. I will still sup­port Matt, but I think he really has been very silly to get involved in this and to tie it in to wordpress.org