Either you give away your product or you don’t. It’s obvious the guy is being an absolute PITA because he can. This isn’t even his first time. Check out what happened with thesis dot com.
Worth adding that WPE is owned by private equity, and they allegedly tried to remove the newsfeed from wp-admin to hide his (dramatic) posts about them
Suppose one of your developers writes on twitter that you don't permit contribution, and you fire that developer on the next day. What reaction do you expect from the people who pay for most of the development?
I'm guessing you are not size of WP Engine and Silver Lake, honest question, if you were, would you want to contribute back to WordPress?
so then the question becomes "Why is the Foundation/project hamstringing a competitor to their director's for profit company who is, in theory, and legally should be, independent?"
How do you think Matt got the money to build his empire?
WP Engine is no different from the million hostings that auto-install WordPress and “abuse” their resources.
Google, Amazon, you name it do this infinite times a day with crawlers.
If you build a business on taking resources from some public source, on a large scale, you could very well be out of a business at any time. This has been the case for a long, long time. And nobody seems to take issue with it.
Is it their right? Sure. I don’t think you’d be here defending them though.