The appropriate twist here would be to have WPEngine find a trusted third party (one or more), start a foundation together and successfully fork wordpress.
I feel like Wordpress is going down the same path as Elastic and other companies have done, make something, open source it and then make a fuss when other companies "misuse" their code? If you want that tight control over how others use your code, then maybe consider not picking an open source license?
If that claim is false, that's perjury.
If you are a party to this dispute, why on Earth would you comment publicly?
If I were an employee at a company being sued I wouldn't say anything related to it even without an order from legal because I wouldn't want to have to risk answering for it in the trial. Why dangle yourself out there as a target for the opposition's lawyers?
I haven't seen any comments from any WP Engine employees. They have an adult CEO, though, so I'm sure she told them not to comment on it.
I wouldn't take how this played out as evidence that WP Engine was opposed to making more significant contributions like sponsoring a real, independent foundation or even putting a significant portion of its revenue toward the project.
Edit: That attracted a lot of downvotes. I was giving my option in response to the parent comment. In my option Automattic would be happy if they forked it.
Is that an option btw? I.e. is it possible to offer hosting with seamless migration from wordpress.org?
At some point in life, people usually stop believing everything that others “literally said”.
My answer was based on the fact that I’ve seen several people who are unaware of what Mullen’s said that precipitated the row.
Money, more and more money for matt, seems to be the matt's driving motivation here. He seems to be projecting his own greed onto others.
Very astute phrasing. Personal problem.
I never said that the license forced them to contribute.
I hate WP Engine - having had first hand dealings with them after they acquired a company I’d spent tens of thousands of dollar with - but nonetheless I fee like there’s probably a pretty strong argument that simple straightforward Wordpress hosting means more people use Wordpress which strengthens the overall ecosystem.
When I first started using Wordpress there was a steep learning curve to get it configured correctly on hosting where stuff wouldn’t break.
I used to pay someone to do that for me, and when they gave up doing that I moved to Flywheel (which was later acquired by WP Engine) and suddenly all of my previous problems with Wordpress from a hosting perspective vanished.
It just worked and the Flyhweel support team was amazing and would even unofficially support the wider implementation of Wordpress (“I changed this and now that thing has broken… I know it’s not your fault but any suggestions?” “Hey, here’s the problem, plus we have fixed it for you!”)
That made me stick with Wordpress for years and build out more sites in Wordpress and recommend it to friends and clients.
Most small businesses (which represents the majority of Wordpress users) don’t want to have to think about hosting: in the same way they expect their mobile phone service to just work, and email to just work, they need Wordpress to just work.
Whatever issues I have with WP Engine they offer a very straightforward “forget about it” service for running Wordpress which ultimately means more people are likely to use it.
I've not seen numbers comparing other significant WP users to them, though, only comparing them to Automattic itself, which seems a bit apples to aardvarks to me.