Matt has sabotaged any chance of a good result for him and Automattic no matter how good this lawyer is. And even if he wins in court he's already lost in the court of public opinion. Its over.
Matt may need to step down if your assessment is correct but that's distinct from what happens to Word Press as a platform.
My sense is that the Word Press negotiating position is stronger and WP Engine will either have to fork or make a much larger contribution. But I may be wrong. If that does not happen then I believe that the private equity players will do a lot more damage to open source communities because a "harvesting paradigm" will continue.
As I see it, the only way for WordPress to survive is if Matt steps down from the board, and the foundation & dot org mess is reorganized in a manner that makes it accountable to the community. Even then, a lot of damage has been done to the reputation of WordPress.
I won't be surprised if we eventually start seeing mainstream reporting on this case from the WSJ and NYT. Luckily, it's an election cycle so that might not happen for a while.
Firms that dominate markets enjoy tremendous inertia in customer choice and can take a long time to die--if, in fact, WordPress is dying. The longer-term perspective on what Silver Lake has been doing to profit from open source efforts by Word Press may reach a very different conclusion about Matt's actions than your assessment.
That's a really good point. But I think (& hope) it's a little different in the open source world, because people have stronger moral opinions about where they hang their hat. We'll see.