Although I’ve thought about this issue endlessly, including most of the issues raised here, there are some things brought up in the comments that I haven’t thought about before. More importantly, you could be right.

That’s why we’re doing this whole thing as an experiment; not the Large Hadron Collider type that could potentially destroy the universe, but more incrementally with just three initial plugins.

Now if in the course of working on these three plugins it looks like we’re going to cause the end of WordPress as we know it, we’ll change course. It’s not that big a deal, and we’ll figure something else out. The only dangerous course of action is doing nothing at all.

Source – Comment by Matt Mullenweg on shackling a free market

That Matt guy. Always showing up in interesting conversations related to something dealing with WordPress with a calm, cool head. How does he do that? It must help when you know for sure what is going on. His comment is the first I’ve heard of Core Plugins being an experiment. It’s also the first time I’ve heard someone clearly spell out three different types of core plugins that will be part of the experiment. An abandoned plugin, a newly created plugin, and functionality taken out of WordPress and put into a plugin.

So far, the discussions surrounding core plugins have been as if everything is set in stone. We now know that is not the case. There is no guarantee that core plugins are going last or if they will prosper. The way Matt presents how core plugins are going to be used brings me back to a calmer state and I think we should watch the experiment take place and see what happens.