> It's just weird how the conversation shifted to portraying Automattic as a leach or a bad maintainer and WPengine as a victim
WPEngine are adults, they can (and are) taking care of themselves.
But sorry, if you start using your position as CEO of Automattic, and President of WPF to:
- push rants forcibly into the dashboards of your for-profit offering's commercial competitors
- lock users of a competitor out of a whole raft of functionality because of your beef with their provider
- break users sites in the name of effectively hostage-taking a plugin
Then what else are you but a "bad maintainer"?
> as a leach [sic]
Matt doesn't want WPE's "revenue-sharing" license agreement to go to the community, the project, or the Foundation, though, he wants it to go to himself, via his private, for profit competitor. That's easily described as leeching.
> is basically marketing (visibility at WordPress events)
Well, given that at these recent events they've given money, been banned from attending and had all references to their name removed, I think their contributions are valid.
Also "that doesn't count, it's just marketing", yes, marketing dollars that they are contributing to the community to make the cost to the rest of the community in hosting events less. You sound like Matt here, "Well, yes, they contribute, but not in the way I tell them to, and in the amount I tell them to, so it's not reallllly a contribution."