So the rumor is that Automattic is for sale, at a value somewhere between $150-300 million. For the 2 of you who don’t know Automattic is Matt Mullenweg’s company, and is behind WordPress (the best blogging platform in the world IMHO), Akismet and now Gravatar. My first reaction when I heard this piece of news was an exclamation of display and a few choice curses.

Very late in the day, I got a chance to think about this story again. Let’s assume that Automattic is for sale. Who in the industry seems to be the best fit and might have the money to meet the $300M number that Matt & Co seem to be looking for? In my head only one company fits the bill, Yahoo. The company has a strong open source ethos, and already owns a number of properties which had well known leaders, namely flickr and del.icio.us. Considering that they already own MyBlogLog, Automattic, especially with Gravatar and Akismet in the fold might be a tempting target. It’s also the only place where I see Matt Mullenweg having a big role post acquisition, although my guess is that he would leave to do something new.

So where does WordPress fit into all this? That’s the part I am struggling with. As a user of the open source platform, I would hate to see that suffer. One thing Yahoo does not do well, either deliberately, but more likely for other reasons, is integrate properties like Flickr and del.icio.us into Yahoo (In most cases it turns out to be a good thing, since Yahoo’s look and feel is crummy at best).

However, the combination of Wordpress.com, flickr, del.icio.us, Gravatar and MyBlogLog makes for a rather compelling social platform, which Yahoo should take a hard look at. As long as they don’t interfere with the open source version, I won’t be complaining.

Do people have any additional thoughts? How might this play out?

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Automattic, Rumor