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Open source doesn't give you carte blanche to leech off someone's infrastructure. Remember when Netgear hard coded someone's NTP server into their routers and all hell broke loose?

Back in the day if you caught someone hot-linking images from your web server it wasn't uncommon for admins to redirect abusive referrers to goatse etc. That usually got them to knock it off real quick.

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Using WordPress.org services isn't some rogue hotlink, it's hardcoded into the WordPress source code. And Matt explicitly refuses to add a config option to switch servers[1] - you have to manually patch WP to do so.

Legally, he may be in the right (I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to pretend like I can accurately predict the outcome of the ongoing lawsuit), but morally I think I can reasonably say that Matt is pretty squarely in the wrong when he's trying to abuse WP.org services to blackmail WP Engine out of 8% of their revenue.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41676885

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