Based on public posts only, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, founder of Wodpress completely lost his mind and went into war against WPEngine for unclear reasons (many suspect it's money pressure perhaps from investors). He claims they don't contribute to Wordpress and WPEngine says while they don't contribute to the core product they contribute aplenty to plugins, sponsor camps and documentation. He claims WPEngine "butchers" WordPress, WPEngine claims they host an unchanged version. (Note: WordPress is a codebase under GPL, you can change it). He claims WPEngine disables revisions and indeed they do and you need to contact support to get it switched on -- but the ability to disable revisions is included with WordPress although normally it's a simple setting. WPEngine claims they do this for performance reasons while Matt claims this is done only because of greed. He claims they violate trademarks, WPEngine says they didn't change how they use trademarks over more than a decade and their usage is referential (nominative) which is legal.
Further, WPEngine points out as recently as 2023 Matt had a positive opinion of them at a fireside chat at DE{CODE} 2023 "when you support companies like a WP Engine, who don’t just provide a commercial service, but are also part of a wider open source community, you’re saying, hey, I want more of this in the world". https://wpengine.com/resources/decode-2023-fireside-chat-mul...
This was merely an argument between the two but then Matt decided to cut WPEngine off from wordpress.org making installing and updating a much more arduous manual process for every WPEngine customer. He did this without any notice to WPEngine. Dragging users into this seriously and negatively impacts WordPress itself and calls have mounted for a WordPress governance overhaul eg https://x.com/QuinnyPig/status/1839340016738480226
That he is not acting rationally was crystal clear when the lawsuit got filed because he came to this very place and started commenting on it while multiple people begged him to just stop because he is digging himself deeper into a hole. Everyone knows you shut up the moment you are sued.
And after that he cut off the Advanced Custom Fields plugin team who is employed by WPEngine from wordpress.org. This plugin has a few million users. https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1841843084700598355
My personal take on this is obviously not positive. This entire debacle hurts open source itself. Mind you: I do not know whether Matt is right or not but there was no need for any of this. If Matt thinks WPEngine violated his trademarks? Asking for a license fee, sending a C&D and suing them are what a trademark holder normally does. Indeed, it might even be beneficial for us all to get judicial review on trademark usage like this, mostly these open source trademarks operate on "gentleman's agreements", I don't think they have ever been tested in court. If Matt has a beef with WPEngine using too much wordpress.org resources? 1) he could've announced that in say three months there will be a cutoff so WPEngine can implement a proxy 2) either fastly or cloudflare would've been happy to take that traffic off his hands (indeed, Matt said after the cutoff both reached out to him). For both of them a thriving web ecosystem means more business and it has a nice marketing value too. Finally, if he has a problem with the amount WPEngine contributes? That's a very hard problem, some ideas are at https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem but inconveniencing countless sites because you have a beef with their hosting company is not going to help that's for sure.