[walkingmiller]

"Remember the dispute is between WP Engine and Automattic, not the WordPress foundation (the .org)."

While you can disagree with Matt's approach, it actually feels like this dispute is more between WP Engine and the WordPress project than it is between WP Engine and Automattic. WP Engine not contributing to the project hurts Automattic a little, but the largest, most profitable companies in the WordPress ecosystem not contributing to the project are an existential threat to the sustainability of the Open Source project.

Companies will always optimize for profits, and contributing to an Open-Source project is only profitable when you are in it for the long run. And we all know that PE firms (which play an important role in our economy) are not in the game for long-term gains. Silver Lake is doing what they are meant to do — maximize profits in the short-term so that they can turn around and sell WP Engine for as much as possible.

Matt is using the leverage he has to ensure Silver Lake is forced to do something that is good for the WordPress project but will never happen because it cuts into WP Engine's P&L.

[appendix-rock]

If Matt wants those to be the terms under which WordPress can be used commercially, put it in the license.

Oh. Wait. He can’t. Because that’s not his call.

[walkingmiller]

I think that is at least an approximation of what he is trying to do with the trademark issue.

If you want to use the trademark, you have to contribute to the success of the project.

There are plenty of Open Source projects that billion-dollar companies completely rely on without contributing back, and this situation puts those projects and companies at risk. An imperfect analogy might be what happened with the XZ Utils backdoor in Linux. The person maintaining the utility seemed overwhelmed, so he was pressured into accepting malicious actors as maintainers. They were able to introduce a backdoor into the utility. If more of these companies would have contributed to help with the maintenance and development of the utility, this would not have been possible.

If WP Engine starts contributing 5% of their revenue to the WordPress project, it helps protect the project that their entire business is built around.

So I think the questions really should be, "Why does Matt feel like this was necessary in the first place? Why wasn't WP Engine contributing more than 40 hours a week to the project?"