What's with WordPress?

There has been some suggestions that WordPress has been raising money by hosting a lot (168,000) articles on unrelated topics on it's servers and using it's high page rank to drive traffic their way. The links are hidden on the WordPress home page, visible if you look at the code, but not if you simply look at the page. It's a strange way to go about it if you wish to keep transparency for your users, and this has caused some stern questions from the community. The links are still there, but clicking them leads only to a 404 error (page not found) page at the moment.

There has been no official comment from Matt as yet (but he did make this comment on it), I assume because he's on holiday in Europe, but a WordPress co-developer has answered the community with his view.

I'm trying not to jump to conclusions, but the lack of transparency bothers me. Matt was at an anti-spam summit only recently, and yet here he is hosting a link farm, it's worrying, slightly. Now, I realise it's not cheap to keep WordPress development running and the site live, but the community has always stepped up and helped in situations like that, if only we'd been asked. Perhaps that's what rubbing many people the wrong way.

Personally, I'm waiting to see what Matt has to say, for the decision to host these articles must have been his, but while I could live with with the 'we were trying to find another way to raise development finance' answer, the chosen method should never have been contemplated.

Update: Matt has spoken. Personally, I was happy with his response.