Matt, talking about a beta release of WordPress another CMS of his own on January 9 2004 in a weblog entry by Dave Shea:

I’m hoping for a public release in the beginning of February. I haven’t decided exactly how it will be licensed yet, but for commercial use there will likely be a charge, simply because if there was something like this out there now I would not at all mind paying a few hundred dollars to save thousands in development costs and chop a month or so off the timeline.

I’m glad he made the right choice. But it’s amazing that WordPress is still free. Think about it, the most complete, functionnal, and semantic CMS out there, is free!

Update: As Matt said in the comments, he was not talking about WP, but about another CMS that was never released. Sorry.